Rural Hospital EHR

As I mentioned in my previous post on EHR Penalties and Meaningful Use Failure, I had a really good discussion with Stoltenberg Consulting about rural hospital EHR at HIMSS this year. While Stoltenberg no doubt works with hospital systems of every size, I could tell that they had a real affection for the rural hospital EHR challenge. Plus, it was great to be educated some more on the challenges rural hospitals face when it comes to meaningful use and EHR since I’ve been doing a lot more writing about it on my Hospital EMR and EHR website.

I collected a few observations from my chat that I think are worth talking about when it comes to the unique rural hospital EHR situation. One of those ideas is the challenge that rural hospitals have in providing EHR help desk support. It’s worth remembering that hospitals are 24/7 institutions that need 24/7 support in many cases. Now imagine trying to staff an EHR help desk for a small rural hospital. From what I’ve seen, most can barely have an IT support help desk available, let alone an EHR help desk. Stoltenberg Consulting wisely sees this as a great opportunity for EHR consults to provide this type of service to rural hospitals. If you spread the cost of a 24/7 EHR help desk across multiple hospitals, the costs start to make sense.

Another interesting observation was that most rural hospitals are mostly Medicare and Medicaid funded. I’m not an expert on the pay scales of rural America, but when you look at the costs of living in the rural areas you realize that they don’t need to make as much money to live. Plus, I imagine in some cases there just aren’t that many jobs available to them. If they aren’t making as much money, then they’re more likely to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid. Why does this matter?

The amount of Medicare a rural hospital has matters a lot since if they don’t show “meaningful use” of a “certified EHR” then they will incur the meaningful use penalties. It’s simple math to see that the more Medicare reimbursement you receive the larger the EHR penalty you’ll incur.

There’s something that doesn’t feel right about the rich hospitals who’ve likely implemented an EHR before the stimulus getting paid the EHR incentive money while rural hospitals who can barely afford to keep their doors open getting not only penalties, but large penalties because of their large Medicare reimbursement. It’s probably water under a bridge now, but I could see why Stoltenberg Consulting suggested that rural and community hospitals should have been given more time to show meaningful use of an EHR.

As I mentioned, I’m still learning about the rural hospital EHR space, but I found these points quite interesting. If you have a different view or have experience that differs, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. No doubt there are thousands of unique rural environments and I’d love to learn more about them and how they’re approaching EHR. Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • I had the opportunity to intern at a rural hospital that was a CAH. They were in the midst of adopting an ER EMR. Finding the funds for ENR in rural areas can be difficult as to $500,000 means alot for such a small hospital. They did meet meaningful use with others EMR they had but it was to interesting to see how such a ‘small’ costs to most hospitals is alot to them.

  • Jared,
    Thanks for the reminder. I forgot about the financing end of things as well. Stoltenberg commented on that as well and how they sometimes even help a hospital that needs some assistance getting the EHR financed.

  • I work at a small rural CAH hospital. We have just signed an agreement with our vendor with a payment plan so that we can purchase the software. The other issue with small hospital is that when there is only a hand full of doctors if they do not want to do something then its hard to get them on board.

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