"We want to put in a centralized business office to serve the needs of local hospitals and provide resources, tools and technology-based solutions that individually, they would not be able to afford but could collectively," Glasgow said.
For all the focus on IT, EMR, PACS and other technologies in health care today, the ultimate problem for rural hospitals remains very human - recruiting and retaining clinicians.
"As younger physicians graduate from medical school, they have been trained using technology. All of the medical schools and hospitals associated with those schools have clinical information technology," Siemens' Bowen said. "The younger physicians go out to rural areas and IT capabilities like access to medical images via PACS or remote access to patient information or access to comprehensive patient records aren't available; very often they are not interested in going to areas where advanced technology isn't available. So technology is also becoming a prerequisite to effectively recruit physicians to rural areas."
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