By STEVEN GOODMAN
The future of rural healthcare won’t be determined by how much money is invested. It will be determined by how wisely that money is used.
That line gets nodded along to at every rural health conference, then quietly ignored the moment the conversation turns to solutions, because the solutions on offer are almost always capital solutions: build a wing, buy a scanner, recruit a specialist who will not, in fact, be recruited. I spent a career building infrastructure for GE Medical Systems, standing up systems for remote patient monitoring before “telehealth” was a word anyone used. The lesson that career taught me is one rural health policy still hasn’t absorbed: the expertise a small hospital needs is usually not missing. It’s just licensed in the wrong state.
The Equipment Isn’t the Bottleneck
Consider radiology, because it’s the clearest version of the problem. A critical access hospital in rural Wisconsin can afford a CT scanner. What it cannot afford, and cannot realistically recruit, is a subspecialist radiologist sitting in the building waiting to read scans that come in one or two at a time. That expertise exists — in large quantities, at hospitals and reading services in Chicago, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee, often sitting idle overnight.
The technology to connect the two has existed for two decades. A scan can move from a rural imaging suite to a subspecialist’s screen in seconds. What can’t move nearly as fast is the paperwork — and there’s more of it than most people outside a hospital credentialing office realize.
A radiologist licensed to practice in Illinois cannot legally read a scan for a patient in rural Wisconsin without a separate license, a separate credentialing process, and — even after clearing both — a payer-enrollment process that may not be worth the trouble.
Multiply that by every specialty a rural hospital can’t staff, and by every state line a patient’s data has to cross, and you get the actual shape of the rural healthcare gap. It isn’t a hospital-building problem. It’s a jurisdiction problem.
Three Fixes, None of Which Require a Capital Campaign
Fixing licensing and reimbursement rules would do more for rural healthcare than another round of capital funding
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