Rural Clinic Productivity |Biomedgrid

Rural hospitals face difficult financial times with rising costs and increasing demand from a low income and poorly insured population base. Many have gone bankrupt and closed in recent years although they are critical to their communities. Like much of healthcare, they are increasingly dependent on outpatient clinic services since specialty inpatient services are often limited in rural locations. In 2019 and 2020 I conducted a survey of hospital outpatient clinics focusing on productivity of their operations at over a dozen California Critical Access Hospitals (CAH).