Can rural practitioners reap the benefits of chiropractic EHR?

Practitioners in rural areas may be wary of chiropractic EHR.

Practitioners in rural areas may be wary of chiropractic EHR.

Though all medical practitioners place the well-being of their patients above all else, cost is always a factor, particularly as prices for property and equipment continue to soar. For that reason, many clinicians, especially in less affluent communities, may be hesitant to invest upfront in chiropractic EHR. After all, though studies have demonstrated that digitized documents have the potential to improve patient care and cut costs, there are enough horror stories about implementation to scare off potential buyers who are already wary.

InformationWeek recently reported that rural practitioners especially may be reluctant to make the leap to EHR software both because of the expense and the belief that this tool is simply too difficult to use.

"For a lot of the staff from the area here and in general in rural areas, computer literacy is not something they were familiar with. Implementation is easy, but adoption is the most difficult," Lee Barron, CEO and CFO of the Southern Inyo Healthcare District, told the source in an interview.

Southern Inyo Hospital is a small facility in the rural town of Lone Pine, California, that relied on just 10 computers as little as a decade ago, the news outlet states. For this clinic, and countless facilities like it, the prospect of digitizing almost every process is an alien and seemingly impossible one.

This divide in implementation is particularly concerning since hospitals and other medical facilities in rural areas may actually have the most to gain from the digitization of health records. As we reported earlier, the state of Maine recently backed a large-scale EHR adoption scheme to ensure that veterans in more isolated regions could receive attentive, educated care even if they couldn't reach a Veterans Affairs clinic.

These obstacles, real and perceived, serve to reiterate the importance of chiropractic EHR software that is easy to understand, and accompanied by ongoing support and quality training. Without this combination, the U.S. healthcare system will never be able to reap the full rewards of this advancement in technology.

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