Weighing in on Electronic Rural Hospital Data Storage.

Limited budgets can limit the resources rural hospitals have in their data storage options. Some are finding that partnerships with larger hospitals in the region can ease the burden of storage needs, which seems to grow with each passing year.

A recent study by Hospitals in Pursuit of Excellence found that rural hospital data storage is a challenge that many facilities are facing. About 23 percent of the population in the U.S. lives in areas outside the urban core. Nearly 20 percent have reached the age of 65. Nearly 17 percent live in poverty and about half of all rural residents have one or more chronic illnesses. These patients travel long distances to get the care they need for those major illnesses and they have less engagement with health professionals.

Adding to the challenges is the fact that these rural facilities lack the infrastructure and data storage capabilities that they need. They tend to fall behind what’s going on in the urban and suburban hospitals in health information technology. The rural hospitals also don’t have the technology to accurately measure the health status of their rural populous.

There are more areas where they are falling short:

• Rural healthcare facilities are limited in scale, which makes them less able to be accountable for patient-centered care.
• Rural hospitals don’t have the tools to recruit the best care workers in the industry.
• The volume issue in the rural communities means that these facilities can’t hit adequate quality standards, which have a direct impact on reimbursement.

There are many positive aspects of healthcare in rural areas today though. Some of these hospitals and healthcare facilities are better able to create specialized health programs that are embraced by entire communities and show positive health outcomes.

The Federal Government is setting goals for the rural community. The feds have poured about $30 million into Regional Extension Center programs to reach a goal of getting 1,000 critical access hospitals (25 or fewer beds) to adopt electronic health records by next year. The process is fairly complex, takes hours and hours of planning, and involves finding rural hospital data storage. There are about 1,500 critical access hospitals in the U.S., and the government believes it can assist each of them in getting started with developing electronic health records.

Yet another challenge these rural facilities face is a lack of IT professionals willing to live and work in these small towns. These employees are critical in implementing and maintaining the electronic health record infrastructure. However, there are third party operations stepping up to be of assistance, including some that offer Picture Archiving and Communication Systems and virtual CD in the cloud, which is an optimal way to store and share medical images.

Watching out for the rural healthcare facilities is OffSite Image Management, Inc. The company has a laser focus on the rural communities and is able to offer vendor neutral archiving that these small facilities can use to store their images and share them with partnering communities where specialists have 24/7 access to the data.