AUSTIN, Texas — Rural hospitals across the country face a variety of obstacles in today’s health care climate, but medical facilities in several states are starting to use innovative technology to meet the needs of patients, providers and staff members.
Hospitals in rural areas are shutting down at rapid rates as more patients are willing to travel to urban facilities for in-network care and providers become frustrated with the lack of amenities they need to provide the best care for their patients.
According to a report conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 170 rural hospitals have closed since January of 2005. More than 120 of those closures have occurred in the last decade.However, in order to avoid becoming one of those statistics, rural hospitals in several states recently upgraded all of their credentialing software with Ready Doc™, the first and only free credentialing software that uses distributed ledger technology to create the most secure solution available on the market.
Ready Doc™ is being utilized by rural hospitals across the country including Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.Ready Doc™, developed by Intiva Health, based in Austin, Texas, allows hospital staff to make sure their providers are properly credentialed much faster than the manual, outdated method of using spreadsheets. The platform also provides automatic monitoring of expiration dates for credentials, makes sure no provider is on the Office of Inspector General exclusion list, and offers HIPAA-compliant secure messaging solutions.