Improving Rural Care and Health Equity with Telemedicine

Healthcare IT News talks with a telehealth expert on the benefits and challenges of virtual care for rural patients. Virtual care has great potential to improve rural health and health equity.  I am enthusiastic about virtual care's potential to address rural healthcare access, and I believe it can be used to improve barriers to access in a number of ways. Rather than requiring patients to travel to a health system's hub where most specialists are – or have clinicians travel to rural clinics to see patients – we work with them to enable their clinics within rural communities with virtual care capabilities so patients may remain within their local community while still accessing specialists they would have had to travel often hours to see.