As a vendor-neutral company, DMS provides economical packages, including mobile medical imaging services to many rural providers to help deliver better community access to health care.

Despite the bad news, rural hospitals do represent a business opportunity for those health technology firms that have affordable solutions. In fact, the nation's approximately 1,200 Critical Access Hospitals plan to continue capital investments in medical imaging to serve rural populations, according to a survey by Regents Health Resources, Inc. (See DM 7719 and DM 7296). Over 63% of CAHs have plans to implement new or additional technology support systems this year, including PACS, RIS, HIS, and EMR.


Several companies package these technology solutions in a way that is affordable and adaptable to small hospitals or rural settings.

"A major issue that small, rural and isolated clinics and hospitals continue to face is access to fast, quality interpretation of the imaging studies performed at their sites. Many facilities feel that the solutions available on the market today are even further out of reach financially due to the recent economic downturn," noted Jeffrey S. Kennelly, RT(R), CIIP, Senior Sales Engineer, NovaRad Corporation. "With all the government intervention in the private sector as well as the open discussion of meaningful health care reform in our country, many of these providers are hopeful for funds to assist them in obtaining these systems. Many who are putting projects off in the hope of this coming to fruition soon are finding themselves continuing to lose market share due to the inability to compete. They are losing money due to the costly, manual processes they continue performing without these systems."

NovaRad's NovaPACS is available at near or even less expense than analog, film-based operations, presenting an attractive option to small hospitals.

"This affords these sites the ability to select the highest quality interpretation service from many available providers. They aren't limited to just the regional radiologists' service offerings. This translates to fast and accurate interpretations for their ordering clinicians thus equating to greater patient referrals. These rural facilities can essentially operate with the same abilities as their competition in the metropolitan environment with the same budget or less."

Clinical technologies are just one dimension, others being billing and administrative.

"At rural hospitals, resources and workforces are limited without a fully staffed business office. With the complexity of healthcare billing, it's not easy to stay on top of government requirements, rules, regulations, and even private insurance requirements for billing and follow-up to recoup the money that the hospital has earned but not received," said Merle Glasgow, Vice President Sales & Marketing, ARx, LLC, Franklin, TN. The company provides business office operations and revenue cycle services. One of their offerings is a centralized business office model to bring economies of scale to rural hospitals.

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