Verity Healthcare

For these dwelling in rural America, healthcare entry is way from a assure. Whether or not it’s waking up at 4 a.m. to drive three hours to the closest specialist, ready six months for a routine checkup, or calling for an ambulance solely to study that it’s 45 minutes away, folks dwelling in rural areas face limitations that their city counterparts not often have to think about.

These entry issues proceed to plague rural communities throughout the nation. At the moment, about 20% of rural Individuals reside in counties with none hospitals, and roughly 70% reside in a county and not using a working towards oncologist.

Dan Liljenquist, chief technique officer at Intermountain Well being, thinks that extra giant well being methods ought to make use of a hub-and-spoke mannequin to make sure that rural suppliers can thrive, he mentioned final month in an interview.

Intermountain — which operates 34 hospitals and 400 clinics, primarily within the Rocky Mountains area — lately joined a consortium to assist popularize the sort of mannequin, Liljenquist added. 

The well being system has teamed up with Microsoft, Epic, Gates Ventures and West Well being to unfold the phrase in regards to the hub-and-spoke rural well being technique. Below this mannequin, giant well being methods accomplice with rural hospitals — this fashion, rural “spoke” hospitals can entry a bigger “hub” well being system’s know-how, employees, medicine reductions and different sources.

Intermountain has partnered with about 40 smaller rural hospitals, Liljenquist famous.

“We realized that if we deploy telemedicine applications successfully into these rural hospitals, we are able to maintain folks native,” he declared. “By means of a digital connection, we are able to put experience within the room with the emergency care physician in a rural setting. Relying on the way you calculate it, we are able to keep away from 13-18% of all transfers into our facilities.”

Mainly, Intermountain’s medical specialists and subspecialists work shifts at “a digital hospital” that permits them to attach with rural suppliers within the higher area. Intermountain fees rural hospitals a “very small fractional payment” to have entry to those clinicians, Liljenquist mentioned.

The general objective is to assist rural hospitals stay operational and develop into extra financially sustainable, Liljenquist identified.

“This permits [rural hospitals] to offer a lot better care and keep away from transfers. Economically, that’s nice for the agricultural hospital. It’s nice for the affected person, and it additionally helps us, too, as a result of we’re capable of higher load-balance what’s coming into our services,” he defined.

There are in all probability seven to 10 different giant well being methods that may very well be taking the identical form of method so as to assist defend entry to rural healthcare, Liljenquist famous.

Picture: Flickr person Mike Fernwood