Health-care accessibility for people living in rural regions has always been a big issue. People not being able to get proper treatment because they lack transport to the doctor or local hospitals not having specialists for every disease. Also, from an economic perspective, traveling is expensive and often not an option considering medical conditions. These problems require modern solutions.
In today’s technology Era and fast-developing medical care, accessibility is the main issue. To conquer this problem, Stanford Health has developed an online medical help platform which is providing health-care for over 2 million people living scattered in 300,000 square miles in the Dakotas.
To this day, the online platform has been implicated in over 300 clinics and 45 hospitals. The main goal is to spread common decision-support tools throughout the whole system as fast as possible. Some of the genius tools implicated in this platform can help patients in real-time without the need to go to the doctor in person, such as Online Doctor Chat.
Until recently, the doctors had to travel a lot to get to their patients and give them proper care. According to yourdoctors.online, the next big goal is to improve the system in a way that allows specialists to connect with distant patients with ease.
Regarding this problem, there are now specialists who consult critical-access hospitals, making sure that their patients can receive proper care close to home.
This online platform is potentially a money-saving as well. The payment model isn’t integrated into the platform yet, but its creators believe that people living in rural regions will be willing to pay for these services. Their beliefs as based on the logic that it’s less expensive to pay to ask a doctor online than to leave their home or work for several hours only to brief up with a doctor.
The further development will be pointed at making it possible to provide scheduled online video chats for distant patients. This improvement would make everything much easier for patients just as for doctors.
New technologies are making things go smoother, faster, and less time-consuming. The key is to keep things simple and user-friendly so even people with modest IT knowledge won’t have a problem using them.
These platforms should be implemented county-wise. Some states are applying similar solutions, but further development is still needed. Hopefully, this problem will be solved. The people in 21. Century deserves proper health-care, but today it’s not just about medicine.
Technology is developing fast and should push other spheres forward. Further development of medicine and health-care are depending on the technology and combining these two will surely give great results.
To conclude, major efforts were made, but the work has only just begun. Already, effects are visible. States that are using these platforms have improved the performances of their hospitals. Some are even above their goal, which is 80% of health coverage. Imagine the effects of implementing these platforms worldwide. The good thing is that the problem has been addressed and people are thinking about how to solve it.
