Medline (Nasdaq: MDLN) announced on May 27, 2026 the signing of a Prime Vendor agreement with Rural Medical Services Inc. (RMS), a non-profit community health center and Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) based in East Tennessee.
Who is Rural Medical Services?
RMS is an FQHC operating in East Tennessee, serving Cocke, Jefferson and surrounding counties. The organization offers integrated primary care services including general medicine, behavioral health, case management, and social benefits eligibility assistance, with a bilingual English/Spanish team to serve migrant populations. The network currently operates seven clinic sites across Newport, Parrottsville, Cosby, Chestnut Hill, Grassy Fork and Jefferson City.
What the agreement covers
Through this Prime Vendor agreement, RMS gains access to Medline’s full medical-surgical portfolio: exam room supplies, personal protective equipment (PPE) and point-of-care (POC) lab solutions. The agreement also includes Medline’s logistics capabilities, designed to simplify ordering and ensure reliable supply delivery.
FQHCs are federally funded structures created to guarantee access to care for underserved or geographically isolated populations. Their budget constraints are structural: they must maximize the value of every dollar spent. A Prime Vendor agreement with an organization of Medline’s scale, the largest distributor of medical-surgical products in the United States, with operations in over 100 countries and more than 45,000 employees, provides purchasing leverage and operational simplification.
It also reflects Medline’s commercial positioning following its Nasdaq listing in 2025, with a stated focus on the community primary care segment.
Medline is not the only major healthcare company to have recently moved toward underserved or community-based care settings.
In November 2024, BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) launched an HPV self-collection screening pilot program at Su Clinica, an FQHC with locations in Brownsville, Harlingen, Raymondville and Santa Rosa, Texas, in collaboration with researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The program evaluated the implementation and effectiveness of self-collected HPV testing in communities with limited access to healthcare resources, with bilingual options and financial support for uninsured patients. The findings are intended to produce implementation blueprints scalable to other underserved communities.