Thirty Years In, Boston Mountain Rural Health Center, Inc. Hasn't Forgotten Why It Started
- Katrina Dupins
- 20 hours ago
- 2 min read
In 1994, a single clinic opened its doors in Marshall, Arkansas, with a simple promise: no one in the community would be turned away for lack of ability to pay. Three decades later, that promise has grown into Boston Mountain Rural Health Center (BMRHC), a federally qualified health center (FQHC) now serving twelve counties across Northwest, Central, and North Central Arkansas.
For CEO Debbie Ackerson, the mission has always been the central focus. She started at BMRHC as an assistant to the organization's first executive director, who became her mentor and showed her firsthand what a community health center could mean for the people it serves. Today she leads an organization with almost 300 employees.
"We do not ever want to forget the reason that we're here," Ackerson said, "and that is to provide high quality, accessible health care to all the residents in our communities that we serve."
That mission is what drew Neil Langer, Associate Medical Director, to leave Texas more than ten years ago. After meeting with BMRHC leadership, he and his family made the move to work in Marshall, Arkansas.
Some of the children Langer once treated have grown into adults working alongside him as colleagues.
For Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Depriest, the relationship with Boston Mountain started long before she worked there. Home from college one weekend, she got sick and walked into the only clinic in town. At checkout, staff offered her the sliding fee scale, a program that adjusts cost based on income. The visit ended up costing her $10.
"That made such a difference to me," she recalls, "between being able to make my rent and having my visit and getting good medical care." Depriest returned home permanently not long after, eventually joining the organization she credits with helping her through a difficult moment. She's now in her 27th year.
Treating the Whole Person
“Mental health is health too,” said psychiatric nurse practitioner Amy White. "There's so many people who struggle with depression and anxiety, and it doesn't make them broken. It doesn't make them different. It just makes them human."
White works with patients on depression, anxiety, and past trauma, working hard to strip away the stigma that keeps some people from asking for help in the first place. Showing up is often the hardest and most important step.
Boston Mountain's integrated care model — medical, dental, and behavioral health all under
one roof — is by design. Patients don't have to navigate separate systems to get whole-person care.
It's a detail Debbie Ackerson echoes about the organization as a whole: most of Boston Mountain's nearly 300 employees live in the communities they serve.
"If our culture is making our employees happy, that our employees are going to make our patients happy, and that's where the patients will want to be, somewhere they can tell that the culture and the atmosphere is welcoming and that the employees are happy."