There’s a huge opportunity that is facing the healthcare industry, one that can be solved. That problem is the lack of readily accessible, comprehensive medical information for people that live in rural America. Rural patients are at once constrained by geographic and socioeconomic factors that hurt their ability to receive holistic, integrated and informative medical advice. With no centralized system of data collection and management, rural patients are essentially capped at the level of care they’re able to receive.

The solution is a health information exchange (HIE) – in this case known as a regional health information exchange (RHIE) or regional health information organization (RHIO). Each RHIO is driven by multi-layered software that integrates and synthesizes disparate data on patients from different facilities, providing healthcare providers with access at the point of care delivery. Armed with a more holistic patient view, healthcare providers are able to deliver a more comprehensive and accurate medical diagnosis and treatment, controlling costs and minimizing risk.

One key obstacle in delivering a RHIO or RHIE is the absence of organized leadership in a regional medical community. Leaders in hospital management, within the state, at healthcare information technology companies, and rural physicians must work together as allies towards the greater goal of improving their industry and medicine as a whole. A regional health information organization or regional health information exchange may be the best place to start.

The current state of rural health poses some challenges and has its own unique needs. While 25% of the current U.S. Population lives in rural communities, only 10% of all physicians practice in rural America. The lack of access to quality healthcare is strained, not only by this disparity, but by the fact that fewer rural employees have access to employer-provided healthcare or prescription coverage.

Additionally, rural Americans generally speaking are older, sicker, poorer and less educated that their urban counterparts. Their median household income is on average $7,000 less and almost 24% of children to rural parents are living in poverty. Rural Americans must also travel further for specialty providers and are less likely than those treated in urban hospitals to receive recommended treatments.

A RHIO (or any health information exchange (HIE)) can arm healthcare providers with the information that they need to make each patient’s visit more thorough and effective. It also allows the patients themselves to take a more proactive role in their own healthcare, by granting providers access to their electronic health record contained within the RHIO or RHIE.