Covid-19 pandemic has prompted rural hospitals to adopt EHR platforms

The electronic health record (EHR) market will reach $14.2bn in 2021. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers and medical professionals constantly need to retrieve and share patient medical records in order to get a better understanding of Covid-19 progression, symptoms and treatments.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare institutions across the world have recognised the importance of integrating new technological advances into their existing systems. With hospitals facing shortages of healthcare professionals due to patient overflow, urgent automation of healthcare systems is needed in order to improve and sustain healthcare safety and quality.

Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted underlying problems with current healthcare systems, particularly in rural areas. Small communities in rural areas often face challenges in delivering high-quality care due to their geographical isolation, workforce shortages, lack of resources and educational disparities.

After the Covid-19 pandemic became a global crisis, US President Trump released an executive order to further expand access to telehealth services during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially in rural communities. This prompted healthcare providers in rural areas to turn to cloud-based technologies in order to solve existing problems.

Perry Community Hospital, The Heights Hospital, DeWitt Hospital and Alliance Hospital have moved to Azalea Health’s scalable, straightforward, flexible and cost-efficient cloud-based electronic health record platform. Azalea Health’s EHR platform follows an efficient ‘one-patient, one-record’ approach that helps healthcare professionals process data from medical records in a transparent and interoperable way.

Since seeing the benefits brought by the cloud-based EHR platform, more hospitals have decided to implement Azalea Health’s telehealth platform solution in order to combat the pandemic.

Recent advances in healthcare information technology have proved to be not only beneficial but also essential to healthcare institutions amid the pandemic. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to stay a national emergency, more companies will develop and improve telehealth solutions and more healthcare institutions will adopt them.

For more insight and data, visit GlobalData's Medical Intelligence Centre