What Will It Take to Transform the Rural Healthcare Landscape?

HealthTech Magazine

The way for success in the rural healthcare landscape is to make it easy to find a doctor, to be a doctor and to pay a doctor,” said Bob Lindner during a ViVE 2024 education session on the challenging rural healthcare landscape. “All of these three things have challenges that can be traced back to the data.”

Bob Lindner Chief Science and Technology Officer at Veda Data Solutions

Many rural healthcare organizations are struggling due to current reimbursement models and lack of resources. This can have an impact on patients in rural areas, who often face challenges with care access.

Health IT leaders from different parts of the industry addressed these pain points and what needs to happen to keep rural healthcare organizations afloat.

Data Can Drive Change for Rural Healthcare

Lindner shared a story of an organization that wanted to know why it was so hard for patients to find appointments for addiction medication. He said it was important to analyze the data because the reason could have been that there were enough providers, but they were hard to find on a website; that there weren’t enough providers and the industry needs to recruit more; or that there were enough providers accepting patients, but they were scheduling them out so far, they might as well have been unavailable.

“You don’t want to jump to a conclusion and try to solve something without understanding what your actual problem is,” said Lindner.

Amy Gleason, chief product officer at Main Street Health, said that many rural healthcare organizations are using older electronic health record systems, and some are still using paper charts. Not having a robust EHR setup makes it difficult for these health systems or clinics to determine which patients have missed screenings or other trends in their patient population. Gleason pointed out that while health plans try to provide their own data to rural organizations, they may all do that in a different way with a different portal. Clinicians don’t have the time to log in to different portals or find out how to get into a spreadsheet — and often, their EHR can’t handle that influx of data anyway. Read the full article from HealthTech.

Connect with Dr. Bob Lindner on LinkedIn. Read more from Bob with Automation, Machine Learning, and the Universe: Q&A with Veda’s Chief Science and Technology Officer and Co-founder, Dr. Bob Lindner.