For those living in rural America, healthcare access is far from a guarantee. Whether it’s waking up at 4 a.m. to drive three hours to the nearest specialist, waiting six months for a routine checkup, or calling for an ambulance only to learn that it is 45 minutes away, people living in rural areas face barriers that their urban counterparts rarely have to consider.

These access problems continue to plague rural communities across the nation. Currently, about 20% of rural Americans live in counties without any hospitals, and roughly 70% live in a county without a practicing oncologist.

Dan Liljenquist, chief strategy officer at Intermountain Health, thinks that more large health systems should employ a hub-and-spoke model to ensure that rural providers can thrive, he said last month in an interview.

Intermountain — which operates 34 hospitals and 400 clinics, mainly in the Rocky Mountains region — recently joined a consortium to help popularize this type of model, Liljenquist added. 

The health system has teamed up with Microsoft, Epic, Gates Ventures and West Health to spread the word about the hub-and-spoke rural health strategy. Under this model, large health systems partner with rural hospitals — this way, rural “spoke” hospitals can access a larger “hub” health system’s technology, staff, medication discounts and other resources.

Intermountain has partnered with about 40 smaller rural hospitals, Liljenquist noted.

“We realized that if we deploy telemedicine programs effectively into these rural hospitals, we can keep people local,” he declared. “Through a digital connection, we can put expertise in the room with the emergency care doctor in a rural setting. Depending on how you calculate it, we can avoid 13-18% of all transfers into our centers.”

Basically, Intermountain’s clinical specialists and subspecialists work shifts at “a virtual hospital” that allows them to connect with rural providers in the greater region. Intermountain charges rural hospitals a “very small fractional fee” to have access to these clinicians, Liljenquist said.

The overall goal is to help rural hospitals remain operational and become more financially sustainable, Liljenquist pointed out.

“This allows [rural hospitals] to provide much better care and avoid transfers. Economically, that’s great for the rural hospital. It’s great for the patient, and it also helps us, too, because we’re able to better load-balance what’s coming into our facilities,” he explained.

There are probably seven to 10 other large health systems that could be taking the same kind of approach in order to help protect access to rural healthcare, Liljenquist noted.

Photo: Flickr user Mike Fernwood