Rural hospitals play a crucial role in providing healthcare to rural Americans, a vulnerable and underserved population; however, rural hospitals have faced threats to their financial viability and many have closed as a result. This paper examines the hospital characteristics that are associated with patients choosing rural hospitals, and sheds light on the types of patients who depend on rural...

PRINCIPAL FINDING rural hospitals with fewer than 50 beds were most in need of assistance and resources to prepare for HIPAA indicating that the Small Hospital Improvement Program chose well in making HIPAA readiness one of three purposes for grants to those hospitals.

This article presents a study identifying benefits and challenges of a novel hospital-to-hospital information technology (IT) outsourcing partnership (HHP). The partnership is an innovative response to the problem that many smaller, rural hospitals face: to modernize their IT infrastructure in spite of a severe shortage of resources. The investigators studied three rural hospitals that outsourc...

Background: Given relatively less favorable health outcomes in rural Alabama, electronic health records (EHRs) have an even greater potential to improve quality and alleviate disparities if meaningfully used. Objectives: We examined rural-urban differences as it pertained to perceived barriers, benefits, and motivating factors of EHR implementation. Methods: We used multivariate logistic models...

INTRODUCTION Though many reports have assessed hospital emergency responses during a disaster that affected the facility's operations, relatively little work has been dedicated to identifying factors that aid or impede the recovery of such hospitals. PROBLEM On 05 October 2005, Hurricane Stan triggered landslides that buried an impoverished Mayan community in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. The ...

We show that the full version of the so-called ‘rural hospital theorem’ (Roth, 1986) generalizes to many-to-many matching where agents on both sides of the market have separable and substitutable preferences.

Beliefs regarding cause and preference of the treatment modality are important factors influencing any epilepsy programme. Patients own attitudes towards the on-going treatment are equally important in ensuring success of any such programme. The study involved interviews of 80 patients with epilepsy attending a comprehensive rural health services project, and was conducted according to a struct...

This is the only volume to address the pressing need for practical information about transitioning from an urban-based nursing education or practice to a rural health care environment. It provides successful strategies that nurses in rural settings can use to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative programs that will meet the needs of individual rural communities. The book details current r...

This is the only volume to address the pressing need for practical information about transitioning from an urban-based nursing education or practice to a rural health care environment. It provides successful strategies that nurses in rural settings can use to develop, implement, and evaluate innovative programs that will meet the needs of individual rural communities. The book details current r...

Background In recent years, Japan has been short of pathologists. There are about 2,000 board-certified pathologists against 130 million people. Most pathologists are working in the urban area and only few are available in rural regions. Telepathology in Japan developed under these circumstances, mainly for intraoperative frozen section diagnosis where no pathologist is available. We have been ...