By Emily Webb
Rural Georgia has a healthcare problem. Though one in five people in Georgia live in rural areas, only one in ten physicians practice in these areas. Hospital closures have become commonplace. All the while, rural counties consistently have higher rates of chronic disease, obesity, and infant mortality, compared to urban districts.
“We need to find other ways to get specialty care and get providers out to these rural communities,” said Mason Reid, a legal consultant with Boling & Company.
As an attorney serving the healthcare industry, Reid and his partner William Boling are witness to the changing landscape of healthcare. In their view, telehealth — technology used to deliver medical and health services to consumers — is the future of providing care to rural populations.
Their presentation at the State of the Public’s Health Conference in Athens, Georgia, on October 17 served to update the crowd of public health professionals and researchers of the current state of affairs of telehealth.
“Telehealth is such a critical tool in the toolbox right now,” Boling said, though rural communities have been slow to adopt it due to a lack of resources or infrastructure.
Telemedicine offers an option for care close to home. Now, many patients rely on hospitals to access basic health services like diabetes care. A wider adoption of telemedicine could help keep hospitals open, said Reid.
Since fall 2016, Jenkins County and Baldwin County hospitals have been sold in distress. Jefferson County and Monroe County appealed to their communities, which agreed to extra taxes to keep their hospitals alive.
Due to Georgia’s decision to reject Medicaid expansion, Disproportionate Share Hospital payments (DSH) and Indigent Care Trust Fund payments (ICTF), both of which provide crucial financial support for hospitals that take on a majority of underinsured or uninsured patients, continue to peter out.
“For hospitals, especially, but for all rural providers, [it’s] a difficult environment that we’re in,” said Boling.
Boling and Reid are hopeful about the growth of telemedicine. In a recent study conducted by Kaufman Hall & Associates, 21 percent of respondents said they would choose to have video visits for middle-of-the-night care.
“Consumers are developing more of an appetite for this,” Reid said. “Maybe some of the stigma around telemedicine as being unsafe or unreliable is going away.”
Boling and Reid describes three models for telehealth, all of which have pros and cons for implementing in rural communities. The main hurdle, said Boling, for taking on any model for telehealth is the novelty of it. Healthcare providers and patients, he said, must be open to it.
Still, Boling and Reid remain optimistic. The proposed CHRONIC Care Act, which is currently making its way through Senate committees, would expand telehealth with federal funding.
“High-end specialists and subspecialists can grow a business model around this [bill], and the local community hospitals and the local community patients all benefit. It’s a win-win-win-win,” said Boling.
