Homework answers / question archive / Providing healthcare in rural areas has its own set of challenges, and executives find themselves having to get creative in how to provide the necessary services to their consumers while having a smaller consumer base, spread out over a much larger geographical area than in urban settings (Commins, 2015)

Providing healthcare in rural areas has its own set of challenges, and executives find themselves having to get creative in how to provide the necessary services to their consumers while having a smaller consumer base, spread out over a much larger geographical area than in urban settings (Commins, 2015)

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Providing healthcare in rural areas has its own set of challenges, and executives find themselves having to get creative in how to provide the necessary services to their consumers while having a smaller consumer base, spread out over a much larger geographical area than in urban settings (Commins, 2015). Two challenges, in particular, that plague the healthcare delivery system in rural areas is reimbursement and the shortage of providers (Shi & Singh, 2019).

According to Shi & Singh (2019), “Across all races and ethnicities, rural residents have lower levels of insurance coverage” (p. 458). Rural hospital systems have also had to contend with dwindling Medicare reimbursements and disruptions in patients’ Medicaid coverage (Commins, 2015).

Another struggle for rural health systems is the recruitment and retention of providers (Commins, 2015). Long swaths of country are in desperate need of primary care providers and specialists. For instance, out of Texas’ 254 counties, 158 of them have no general surgeon. 35 of its counties have no physicians at all.

To address these two challenges, many rural systems have chosen to affiliate with formerly competing systems to benefit from increased shared capital and economies of scale and reduce redundancies of similar services (Commins, 2015). They have also integrated various service areas into one network to allow for greater Medicare reimbursements.

I live in a rural area, but the town in which I live is home to a large medical system that has been systematically purchasing each small independent hospital in its surrounding area. The smaller hospitals that have been bought out now have the capital available to purchase necessary new equipment, and redundant services in our locality can be eliminated. The purchasing hospital system can choose to use certain hospitals to house certain specialties. Because the system has achieved greater economies of scale, it can now afford to pay its providers comparably to urban areas while also offering them a lower, rural cost of living.)

References

Commins, J. (2015). Rural healthcare and the challenge of population health. HealthLeaders Magazine, 18(8), 12-23.

Shi, L., & Singh, D. A. (2019). Delivering health care in America: A systems approach (7th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC.