More than 60 million Americans live in rural communities, where small hospitals strain to stay open amid increasing healthcare demands and dwindling revenue. Today, Nov. 15, 2018, is for them, and for the dedicated healthcare providers among them.

It’s National Rural Health Day, the third Thursday in November designated by the National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health to celebrate rural healthcare providers and call attention to the unique health needs of rural populations. More than 80 small community hospitals have closed since 2010; hundreds of others struggle to survive.

Telehealth services, now offered by several healthcare systems nationwide, have become a lifeline for rural patients who can’t always travel the distances required to reach urban hospitals for care. Physicians and other healthcare providers electronically communicate “face to face” with these patients to help them manage everything from influenza to chronic conditions such as diabetes or congestive heart failure.

But as demand for long-distance healthcare grows, telehealth isn’t the only solution (nor the best one) available to healthcare providers.

The Joint Commission this year announced a major change for hospitals and health systems seeking advanced, disease-specific, Total Hip and Total Knee Replacement Certification. Hospitals now need to comply with additional performance measures to try to address the top clinical concerns in healthcare today.

The new measures are associated with fewer post-op complications, readmissions and deaths and lower cost – emphasizing how critical it is for healthcare to move the needle in these areas. In addition to focusing on clinical metrics, the Joint Commission is emphasizing the need for patient-reported feedback – once again acknowledging that patients are key partners in reducing healthcare costs. 

Lowering cost, improving post-surgical outcomes and driving patient-reported feedback are lofty goals for the Joint Commission to set for hospitals. But these goals are achievable if hospitals expand how they deliver orthopedic care to include reaching patients outside hospital walls.

There is a lot of focus in our industry lately on patients as healthcare consumers. Particularly in the case of childbirth, expectant moms increasingly have a choice of where to deliver their babies. Hospital shopping is common among this group of women, and competition is fierce among hospitals for their business. That’s why it’s more important than ever to listen to what our patients are saying about us.

Surveys are a great way to gain insight into how new and expectant women feel about their hospital experience – from their first interaction with us through the early years of raising their children. But traditional surveys are often delivered to patients at inconvenient times or end up being thrown away.

How do you request patient feedback in a way that patients are more likely to respond?

At Northwestern Medicine in Illinois, we bring care directly to patients through our digital engagement platform. Branded as NM Parent Connect, we reach expectant moms on their mobile devices at targeted points in their care journeys. We send them automated education, but also have the ability to inform them of our resources and to gain critical patient feedback at any time.

As the mother of a toddler, recent news headlines about the dangers of baby walkers—and pediatricians’ repeated calls for a ban on them—caught me by surprise.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has long recommended against—and unsuccessfully sought a ban on—these walkers. This month, a study in the AAP journal Pediatrics has renewed calls for that ban.

Still, it was the first I’d heard of the academy’s warnings. And while I never used a walker with my child, I could not recall my doctors advising me not to. It made me wonder how many other new and expectant moms missed the warnings as well.

Mostly, it highlighted the need for pediatricians to more effectively communicate with new parents about parenting and child development—and not just during well-child visits in the doctor’s office, when the information provided is too easily forgotten later on.