Technology Solutions for Rural Healthcare Challenges
How telehealth and cloud-based tools can help rural practices reach patients, and the practical limits to plan around.
Rural practices face real obstacles: too few providers, long distances and limited resources. Technology can't fix all of that, but the right tools can widen your reach and cut the overhead of running a small practice.
Rural Healthcare Challenges
Provider Shortages
- Limited access to specialists, including psychiatry
- Long travel distances for patients and providers
- Difficulty recruiting and retaining staff
Technology Barriers
- Limited or unreliable broadband, for practices and patients
- Older equipment and infrastructure
- Tight budgets for software and IT support
Patient Access
- Transportation challenges
- Long waits for appointments
- Services that simply aren't available locally
Technology Solutions
Telehealth
- Specialist and follow-up visits without the drive
- Mental health care, which often works well by video
- Fewer missed appointments due to weather, work or transport
Plan for connectivity. Have a fallback, such as a phone call, for when video drops, and check your payers' and state's current rules on audio-only visits before relying on them.
Remote Monitoring
- Devices such as blood pressure cuffs or glucose meters that report readings between visits
- Useful for chronic conditions where frequent in-person checks are hard
Cloud-Based EHR
- Access from any computer with an internet connection
- No servers to buy or maintain
- Updates applied automatically
- Lower upfront costs, and easy to scale as you grow
Cloud software does need a working internet connection, so a reliable connection (and a backup, such as a mobile hotspot) matters.
How Jogaza Can Help
Jogaza EHR is a cloud platform for psychiatric and behavioral health practices, which suits rural practices extending mental health care across a wide area:
- Telehealth: connect Zoom or Google Meet, and a meeting link is created for each telehealth visit.
- Online booking and reminders: patients book telehealth or in-person visits online and get reminders by email, and by text message if they've agreed to texts.
- Web patient portal: secure messaging, refill requests, appointment requests and forms, with sign-in by a one-time email code.
- Forms before the visit: intake packets and screeners sent ahead of time, so visit time goes to care.
Jogaza runs in the web browser. It has no offline mode and no native mobile app, so plan for a reliable internet connection.