The healthcare plan developed within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) seeks to advance the health information network across the nation. However, rural hospitals aren’t seeing the same level of advancements as medical facilities in more populated areas.
According to a report compiled by the Altarum Institute, rural hospitals are less likely to have adopted electronic health records (EHRs) than hospitals in urban areas. Critical access hospitals, or CAHs, are less likey to have established their EHRs, even though it’s a critical component of the meaningful use guideline in the ARRA.
Rural hospital data storage is also a considerable issue as more rural facilities look to get rid of their film and CD storage processes and look toward digital silos for their storage needs.
The report from Altarum says that the gap in healthcare IT between the rural facilities and the urban facilities will continue to widen if there is no support network developed to ease the pain these rural facilities experience, which is mostly financially related.
There are more than 2,000 rural hospitals that have less than 50 beds, but serve around 50 million rural Americans. These are the lion’s share of the 62 million Americans who live in areas that have little to no primary care choices.
One of the three biggest factors in this gap is the lack of information for health IT adoption in these rural areas. These facilities receive very little guidance on how to implement the latest technology related to health IT.
Finances are another primary roadblock to quality IT solutions in the rural areas. Rural healthcare facilities therefore can’t embark on strategic planning or consider long-term implementations of new IT solutions. With such a limited population pool, these facilities also struggle with resources related to qualified professionals, which includes IT staff. Nursing personnel is also in short supply, and especially nurses who have experience with implementing new IT systems.
With an abundance of healthcare facilities and hospital groups connected throughout the urban areas, options for collaboration are plentiful. However, rural facilities have virtually no collaborative options. If a hospital in a populated area lacks something, a partnership with another facility can be established to gain access to what is lacking. These alliances help provide efficiencies and in the end, higher quality care for patients.
Rural hospital data storage no longer has to suffer from a lack of resources. The cloud offers a resource that is available to any facility with an Internet connection. Furthermore, previous concerns about security, especially for sensitive medical information, were a roadblock for many healthcare IT professionals. A continued focus on higher security has dissuaded many of those original concerns.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., is committed to rural facilities, all of which deserve the same high quality of IT options that healthcare facilities have access to in the urban areas. Rural data storage problems become a non-issue with our support. Rural facilities face an obvious uphill battle when it comes to funding, so we have built its solution around a pay-as-you-use platform, which helps to control the cost of medical imaging storage and retrieval. If you’re operating in a rural area, consider adopting OffSite’s solutions today.