By Aaron Bolton and Arielle Zionts – The emergency department at Big Sandy Medical Center is one room with a single curtain between two beds. It’s one of the many parts of the 25-bed rural hospital that need updating, former CEO Ron Wiens said.
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By Dr. Nick van Terheyden – If you’ve ever tried to see the Mona Lisa in person, you know the feeling: a shuffling mass of humanity, phones held aloft like ritual offerings, security guards barking orders, and a vague sense that whatever you’re looking at cannot possibly justify this level of chaos.
By Emily Embry – Over the past several years, much of the conversation around remote care has focused on growth. Services expanded, reimbursement evolved, and adoption increased across primary care, specialty practices, hospitals, and federally qualified health centers.
By David Lareau – Medicare Advantage oversight has entered a more data-driven phase, with regulators focusing closely on how diagnoses are identified, documented, and submitted for risk adjustment. At the center of that scrutiny is the practice of “suspecting,” which involves searching patients’ medical records to identify…
By Jackie Mattingly & Lance Alston – Rural hospitals are not trying to do something unique with cybersecurity. They are trying to keep care available in their communities. They are trying to protect patients. They are trying to meet rising expectations with limited staff, limited funding, and little room for operational disruption.
By Benjamin Henry – Healthcare’s invisible data layer is emerging as one of the most consequential determinants of real-time, AI-supported care delivery. Many IT organizations still see data as an infrastructure drain or just for back-office analytics.
By Zac Amos – With cyberattacks in the healthcare industry becoming increasingly prevalent over the past few years, cybersecurity infrastructure has had to develop rapidly. Yet, traditional methods often focus exclusively on technical barriers such as firewalls and encryption. They overlook one of the health sector’s most underappreciated risks: human error.
By Matt Seefeld – Behind staffing shortages and reimbursement pressure lies another challenge: complex billing workflows that force small teams to spend valuable time chasing payment instead of delivering care.
By Arielle Zionts and Sarah Jane Tribble – In the final days of 2025, governors around the country trumpeted the hundreds of millions of federal dollars they won from a new, $50 billion rural health fund. But plans to spend those nine-digit awards aren’t all warmly received.