The healthcare needs of rural residents don’t differ from the needs of residents living in highly populated areas. However, access to the kind of specialized care that is sometimes needed isn’t always available to your rural residents.
For people who make their living operating heavy farm equipment and machinery, they come into a lot more encounters that can be potentially harmful than the typical worker who sits at a desk in a cubicle all day. They run into situations where they need quality care, fast. If an air ambulance flies them out to a facility far away, how do you get their medical records (which are almost always stored electronically) with them to the other facility?
But it doesn’t have to be a farmer that needs specialized care that the nearest critical access hospital can’t provide – anyone can have an accident or a health issue that requires more emergency care. What happens when their medical record needs to be transferred to the tertiary hospital? Is your rural healthcare facilities capable of transferring the data, which includes medical imaging, or are you left in the dust because of your limited budgets and limited pool of IT experts?
More and more critical access hospitals like yours are acquiring the technology you need to support a person in an intensive care unit. You’re able to deliver babies and run diagnostic tests and do routine surgeries. You might not be transplanting organs, caring for burn patients or doing brain surgery, but you’re capable of some specialized care. All the problems occur when there is no equipment available that allows a specialist the ability to monitor a patient from miles away. Your hospital data needs to be shared.
The critical access hospitals aren’t always hours away from bigger facilities, but in the event of a natural disaster, travel can become impossible, which means patient information could need to be transferred electronically between disparate facilities. Hospitals like yours with less than 50 beds definitely face an uphill battle when it comes to meeting all the regulations under Meaningful Use. Your facility is either remote, small, has low patient volume, limited resources, few clinicians, lack of money and a lack of affordable connectivity.
It’s clear that in order for patients in these rural area to get quality care, there needs to be a bigger focus on health. People shouldn’t have to drive miles and miles from their community to another just because there is no means of communication between their local doctors and specialists in other cities.
Even in bigger cities, healthcare providers struggle to transmit hospital data from one department to another. When vendors offer healthcare providers vendor neutral archiving solutions, the problems melt away. Medial images are more easily shared between departments and between facilities, regardless of what type of hardware they’re using.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., specializes in offering rural communities a means of communication that offers top quality without the premium prices. At OffSite, we know your don’t have all the resources that bigger facilities possess, but we also know your patients deserve the same quality care. OffSite has developed a technology that allows you to securely store your medical images and share them with whomever needs to see them. Visit us today and find out how you can start offering your patients the care you’ve been looking for.