Arkansas Healthcare Provider Data

Top Healthcare Specialties in Arkansas

• Primary Care
• Family Medicine
• Dentistry
• Mental Health
• Cardiology

Major Healthcare Markets in Arkansas

• Little Rock
• Fayetteville
• Fort Smith

Regulatory Environment

The Arkansas State Medical Board requires 40 CME hours per biennial cycle, with mandated opioid-prescribing education baked in, and the state belongs to both the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact and the Nurse Licensure Compact. A 2021 law opened a path to full independent practice for nurse practitioners who log 6,240 collaborative hours, and NP-owned clinics have been spreading through rural counties since. Telehealth is permissive: no in-person visit required to establish care, parity coverage for commercial insurers, and heavy use across the Delta where the nearest specialist can be two hours away.

How does Arkansas Medicaid expansion work?

Differently than everywhere else. Arkansas launched the 'private option' in January 2014, using Medicaid dollars to buy commercial marketplace plans for expansion enrollees instead of enrolling them in traditional Medicaid. The model survived three renamings (it now runs as ARHOME) and covers roughly 240,000 Arkansans, most of them in qualified health plans. Arkansas was also the first state to enforce Medicaid work requirements, in 2018, and about 18,000 people lost coverage before a federal court halted the program in 2019. Providers get commercial reimbursement rates for much of the expansion population, which softens the payer-mix pain that rural practices feel in traditional-Medicaid states.

Market Overview

Little Rock is the referral center of gravity. UAMS runs the state's only academic health sciences center and its only adult Level 1 trauma center, Arkansas Children's Hospital is one of the largest pediatric facilities in the South, and Baptist Health, the state's biggest system by beds, competes with CHI St. Vincent across the metro. When a complicated case originates anywhere in Arkansas, odds are the chart ends up in Little Rock.

What is happening in Northwest Arkansas?

The fastest market shift in the state. The Fayetteville-Bentonville corridor keeps adding residents on Walmart, Tyson, and J.B. Hunt money, and the healthcare buildout is following. The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine welcomed its first class of 48 students in July 2025 on the Crystal Bridges campus in Bentonville, a new medical school in a metro that had none. Washington Regional, Mercy, and Northwest Health are expanding facilities to keep pace. Provider counts in Benton and Washington counties grow every quarter, and the records there age faster than anywhere else in the state.

Who holds rural Arkansas together?

Twenty-three critical access hospitals, a large FQHC network, and the state's AHEC pipeline. Some Delta counties have no practicing primary care physician, and several southern and eastern hospitals have closed or dropped service lines over the past decade.

For data buyers the split matters more than the totals. A statewide list mixes system-employed cardiologists in Little Rock with solo NPs in Delta towns, and those two segments need different campaigns, different contact fields, and different verification cadences. We build Arkansas files at order time and segment by region and employment status, an approach our healthcare lead generation guide walks through, and our healthcare data vendor comparison shows how national files handle small rural markets like the Delta, which is to say, mostly they don't.

Who buys Arkansas data? Medical device and pharma teams working Little Rock's specialty base, EHR and billing vendors chasing the Northwest Arkansas practice boom, and staffing firms recruiting into the same rural hospitals that struggle to hire. A 26,000-record state sounds small until you notice that every one of those segments needs a different slice of it.

Official Resources

• Arkansas State Medical Board
• CMS NPI Registry
• BLS Healthcare Occupational Data