America has more than 2,000 small town hospitals, most of which are in rural areas. Very few of these can say they aren’t affected negatively by the push to adopt electronic medial records systems.
Hospitals that are implementing electronic medial records systems are spending billions of dollars and putting their IT personnel to the test. Most critical care facilities can attest to struggling with a lack of resources, from cash to human resources. Obviously, if there is any kind of a promise to build up EHR systems, or electronic health record systems, in a pain free fashion, rural hospitals are failing to live up to that promise.
The saving grace for some of these rural facilities comes from larger hospitals in the nearest city. However, when they turn to another entity for help, they give up some autonomy. This is a fair trade for the rural facilities that would otherwise have no other alternative, either because of financial constraints or a lack of IT personnel to implement an EHR system.
The advantage to adopting an EHR system is that healthcare providers have easier access to medical records and can view them from anywhere. For rural providers, this means they can more easily share their rural hospital data with experts far away. This includes medical imaging, which is often critical in determining the best course of action a doctor should take to properly care for the patient.
Many facilities run into issues when sharing rural hospital data from department to department or from facility to facility, mostly because the disparate technology each facility or department uses is not compatible with various file types. The fix for this issue is vendor neutral technology that allows sharing of rural hospital data regardless of the type of system each entity is using.
For healthcare providers still using CDs to share medical imaging, the switch to EHR is a tremendous boost. For hospitals using CD burning technology, the risks are great and the entire process is inefficient, from the burning process, which sometimes fails to work, to the storing of the CDs. Time is wasted as the CD is mailed or carried by hand from one doctor to the next, often getting lost in the process, which poses a HIPPA compliance risk.
What rural hospitals need is a system that allows them to get rid of their antiquated CD burning technology. They need to have technologists spend their time executing more important tasks than burning CDs. Replacing this system with a process that uses a custom URL wipes away all the inefficiencies inherent in CD burning methods.
OffSite Image Management has developed the technology rural providers need to upgrade their services while not breaking the bank. In fact, OffSite caters to the rural facilities as the founders of the company came up in facilities just like those 2,000-plus critical care facilities throughout rural America. Our simple, two-step process requires no additional hardware. All you need is a custom URL that’s managed through our VNA datacenter. All of your data will be protected and is totally secure. Any responsibility to data access is up to the patient. Call us today and find out how simple our implementation process is.