Jordan Valley Health CEO predicts strategy shifts, acquisitions amid government budget changes

Last edited 3:24 p.m., Feb. 20, 2026 [Editor's note: This report was clarified to reflect that substance abuse care is already offered by Jordan Valley Health.]

Dr. Matthew Stinson, president and CEO of Jordan Valley Health since June 2024, said yesterday that the Springfield-based federally qualified health center is one of the largest in the state with its eye on growth through program development and acquisitions.

The organization recently rebranded from Jordan Valley Community Health Center as a way of finding its voice and better promoting its role as a community-based health care organization that provides primary care and support to underserved residents, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. 

“I don’t think larger is our goal. I think best is our goal,” Stinson told SBJ Executive Editor Christine Temple at the publication’s monthly People You Need to Know event yesterday.

Currently, Jordan Valley Health serves roughly 70,000 area residents, Stinson said, and 95% of that group earns less than 200% of the federal poverty level. The organization has over 800 employees.

Stinson said Jordan Valley Health – founded in 2003 at an East Division Street strip mall location, according to the organization’s website, but now comprising 10 locations across southwest Missouri, along with additional mobile services and school-based clinics – is currently seeking to expand and optimize its community health care offerings in a time of federal and state policy and budget cuts and changes.

“You know, the winds are going to go where they go with what our state and federal government wants,” Stinson said. “And right now, we’re in a place where there’s a lot of pushback on some of the expansion of Medicaid and other services. And I don’t necessarily think that the pushback is wrong, in that if you’ve been up to Jefferson City recently, you’re hearing the same people that a year ago talked about we want to make sure we get this money out into the community are now saying we’ve got to cut budgets. And so, I do think we want to be fiscally responsible with how we do things. I think what we are advocating for through this is, let’ s make sure that when we make cuts to the budget, that has the littlest impact that it can on the people that we serve.”

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a large-scale budget federal reconciliation bill, was signed into law in July 2025. The law includes significant funding cuts and policy changes to Medicaid and the Health Insurance Marketplace, along with changes to Medicare physician payments and medical student loans, among other health care related items such as an expansion of health savings accounts and changes to health insurance premium tax credits.

Mulling cuts to administrative levels at Jordan Valley Health while preserving service delivery, along with addressing how to deal with upcoming increases to Medicaid work requirements, are among Stinson’s considerations right now, he said.

Stinson saluted his predecessor Brooks Miller for sharing strong mentorship with him and ensuring Jordan Valley Health was on a solid footing as its leadership transitioned in the current health policy era.

“How we take care of people ... that’s not going to change,” Stinson said. “We still want to be the same organization in how we take care of people.”

He added, “We have a model here that Brooks, myself and (Dr. Nick Pfannenstiel, executive vice president and chief operating officer) also helped to develop. We think that model needs to go to other places, and so we’re looking to push that out into other communities.”

Stinson said Jordan Valley Health is considering adding more services. One example of services already added, he said, is substance abuse care.

“We never had an idea that we wanted to get into substance use services,” Stinson said. “We just started seeing moms who were addicted to substances, who were coming in pregnant, and so there was not a good resource in the community for them to be taken care of. And so, we had to figure out how to do it.”

Stinson said he’d been talking to state-level officials last week regarding the Missouri Department of Social Services’ $216 million allocation received during the first year of the federal government’s recently approved five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program.

“I think it’s so new that the state isn’t really sure how they want to administer it,” Stinson said of the new funding. But I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to advocate for things that we believe will help transform health care to rural communities. So that isn’t necessarily the things we’ve done in the past.”

He said he also expects Missouri to see consolidations among the state’s federally qualified health centers.

Asked if Jordan Valley Health expects acquisitions in the next few years, Stinson said he “would be surprised” if the organization doesn’t acquire new locations. “So you probably see us outside of southwest Missouri coming in the next five years.”

Stinson noted that Jordan Valley Health does not yet have a Christian County location, but that “we’re going to be there.”

Stinson also predicted Jordan Valley Health will deploy mobile health centers to areas where it “doesn’t make sense” to provide a full-time building. He predicted partnerships with large hospital systems to leverage existing resources in communities across southwest Missouri.

Stinson compared Jordan Valley Health strategy planning to that of larger local health care systems such as Mercy Springfield Communities and CoxHealth: “We don’t plan out as far as they do because we don’t have the need to do that. And I think that allows us to do something really well, and that is pivot.”

He added, “We’ll do the things that our communities need us, which are not always going to look the same.”

One example Stinson cited was a child care program based in Lebanon combining day care with after-school program offerings, as well as the presence of community health workers who provide medical and dental care.

“We can do that in real time, not just when a parent brings them in if they’re sick,” he said. “We have permission to take the kid and have them seen right then, and we communicate with the parent those kinds of things we want to do.”

Additionally, Stinson said Jordan Valley Health will lean into adding more surgeries to its menu of health care offerings. “We make sure that we’re doing the surgeries that our patients need that can be done in the outpatient basis,” he said, freeing up resources at hospitals.