Rural Health Telecom recently developed a dual-provider, fully managed IT service targeted for hospitals and healthcare providers in rural areas.
The Affordable Care Act places a particular focus on healthcare in America’s rural areas. One-quarter of the American population lives outside of urban centers, but only 10 percent of the nation’s physicians practice in those areas.
“Our job is to enable better healthcare opportunities for families in all areas of the country through making the best telecommunications technology available and affordable to rural healthcare providers,” said Rural Health Telecom CEO and founder, Tim Koxlien.
The company’s managed IT service works through multiple telecom carriers so that healthcare centers can build redundancy into their IT systems. Data type monitoring and bandwidth consulting keep networks efficient, and 24/7 monitoring helps to guarantee uptime.
Healthcare providers using the service will have diverse routes for flexible facility installation along with dual carrier wired and wireless options.
The Affordable Care Act focuses on four main areas for improving rural healthcare. The ACA funds the training and placement of 16,000 new primary care physicians in rural towns over the next five years.
The act will also fund the expansion of community health centers to serve an additional 20 million people.
Additionally, Area Health Education Centers, which train medical professionals and encourage to work in non-urban pockets of the country, will receive expanded access to funding.
Lastly, the Affordable Care Act provides grants for tele-health initiatives and other creative ways to overcome geographic barriers to healthcare.
If an on-premises server in a rural medical facility goes down, the facility must wait until its own staff or outside technicians can get the system back online. For hours or even days, the facility would not have access to electronic medical records.
Managed services deliver continuous data access in the event of an on-premises outage. “Our entire focus is on ensuring that the doctors and administrators never have to worry about the technical aspect of these systems,” Koxlien concluded.
Edited by
Braden Becker
