What rural healthcare should demand from technology now

Rural healthcare organizations are making consequential technology decisions with little margin for error. More than 40% of rural hospitals operate at a financial loss, and workforce shortages, geographic isolation, and service reductions continue to threaten care quality. In communities with few alternatives, losing a critical service or capability can put local access at risk.  

Where can technology genuinely change the equation? Five leaders from Nordic examine how rural healthcare organizations can prioritize investments that expand access, extend workforce capacity, strengthen resilience, reduce risk, and remain sustainable over time while best addressing the healthcare needs of the community. 

Their perspectives highlight that technology creates the most value when it solves a defined problem, reduces complexity, and strengthens the organization’s ability to deliver care. 

Meet the contributors 

Each contributor brings experience working with rural healthcare organizations, along with complementary expertise across the health IT issues explored in this article. 

• Jason Griffin, Managing Director, Digital Health, brings expertise in cybersecurity, digital strategy, and technology-enabled transformation.  

• Mary Sirois, Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions, focuses on healthcare digital and clinical transformation, innovation, and designing technology strategies around patient, clinician and workforce needs.  

• Dan Thelen, Director, Technology and AI Strategy, advises healthcare leaders on technology investment, governance, operating models, and sourcing. 

• Angela Clubb, Senior Manager, Strategic Advisory Services, focuses on clinical operations, quality and regulatory strategy, EHR optimization, and health IT transformation.  

• Rachel Weissberg, Vice President, Client Partnerships, is a healthcare technology and commercialization leader focused on connecting healthcare challenges with solutions that align technology, people, and processes around meaningful, sustainable outcomes. 

Where can technology make the greatest difference for rural healthcare organizations? 

Jason Griffin 

Technology makes the greatest difference when it extends scarce capacity, reduces operational friction, and helps rural organizations operate as part of a connected ecosystem rather than isolated facilities. 

Workforce enablement, virtual care, cybersecurity, interoperability, and automation are important opportunities. Telehealth and remote patient monitoring can extend the reach of specialists into communities where recruiting them may not be feasible. Interoperability can support shared-service models while allowing organizations to maintain autonomy. AI and automation can also reduce administrative burden across already-stretched clinical and back-office teams. 

Where we get into trouble is assuming technology can solve structural problems. It cannot create nurses, physicians, pharmacists, or other resources that do not exist. It cannot make an unsustainable reimbursement model sustainable or eliminate barriers such as transportation. 

Instead of asking what technology rural healthcare should adopt, leaders should consider which structural constraints they are trying to overcome, and where sustainable technology can materially improve access, increase capacity, change the economics, or reduce risk.  

Rather than more technology in general, rural healthcare organizations need investments that strengthen resilience and sustainability. 

How should rural health systems design digital strategies around the people they serve? 

Mary Sirois 

Digital strategy has to start with the people who will experience and deliver it, not the technology itself. 

Leaders should first consider what problems they are trying to solve for patients, clinicians, or staff and how they will know whether the investment improves their experience and clinical outcomes. 

In a rural environment, every investment has to work harder. Technology should make it easier for patients to access care, navigate the healthcare system, communicate with providers, and receive care closer to home. It should also improve the clinician experience by reducing administrative burden, simplifying workflows, expanding access to remote clinical subject matter experts, and helping already-stretched teams spend more time on patient care. 

Leaders should evaluate technology in the context of the entire care experience. Can virtual care eliminate an unnecessary trip as well as open in-person schedules to those most in need? Can automation give clinicians time back? Can better integration create a more seamless experience for patients and staff? 

If a new solution adds clicks, handoffs, platforms, or workarounds, it may make the underlying capacity challenge worse. The goal is a simpler, more connected digital ecosystem that improves patient and clinician experience, care quality, access, capacity, and sustainability. 

How should leaders prioritize technology investments when resources are limited? 

Dan Thelen 

Rural health leaders need to shift the conversation from what technology needs replacing to what capabilities their communities cannot afford to lose. 

Technology portfolios should be assessed based on five considerations:  

1. Impact on patient access and quality 
2. Operational and cybersecurity risk 
3. Workforce capacity 
4. Total cost of ownership 
5. The organization’s ability to implement and sustain the investment 

That assessment can lead to four possible decisions: 

1. Renew essential systems that remain viable. 
2. Retire redundant or underused technology. 
3. Recompete contracts or sourcing arrangements that no longer deliver sufficient value. 
4. Fund new capabilities that address a demonstrated need with measurable outcomes. 

The strongest business case is not necessarily the one with the highest financial return on investment. For a rural hospital, maintaining a critical service locally, preventing an extended outage, reducing clinician burden, or avoiding unnecessary patient transfers may be more consequential. 

The same discipline should apply to AI. A targeted AI capability that reduces documentation burden, improves revenue-cycle performance, or expands workforce capacity could deliver immediate value. But AI should not displace investments needed to address critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities, unreliable infrastructure, or threats to essential clinical operations. 

A defensible technology strategy requires deliberate choices, including what not to fund. 

How can technology improve clinical workflows without adding more burden? 

Angela Clubb 

The workflow should come first. Before investing in a new platform, dashboard, or automation tool, leaders should understand how care is delivered today, where clinicians and staff experience friction, and whether the proposed solution will remove work or simply move it somewhere else. 

Technology improves quality and performance when it makes the right action easier at the point of care. That can mean embedding guidance within existing clinical workflows, using data to identify gaps earlier, automating reporting where possible, and eliminating duplicative documentation and manual reconciliation. 

Clinicians, operational leaders, quality teams, and IT also need to be involved early rather than asking frontline teams to adapt after a solution has already been selected. 

For rural organizations, every new tool creates ongoing responsibilities for maintenance, training, governance, validation, and support. Success should therefore be measured through practical outcomes, such as fewer manual steps, less documentation burden, more reliable data, earlier visibility into performance gaps, and more time for patient care. 

If technology adds complexity without strengthening those outcomes, it is not modernization. It is another layer of burden. 

How can rural health leaders ensure technology investments solve the problems that matter most? 

Rachel Weissberg 

Start with the problem, not the product. Over nearly three decades working in healthcare technology and bringing new solutions to market, I’ve seen one lesson remain consistent: Technology alone rarely creates transformation. The real work is understanding the problem deeply enough to determine what combination of technology, people, processes, partnerships, and operating models can actually solve it. 

That discipline matters even more in rural healthcare, where resources are constrained, and every investment has to earn its place. The answer may be virtual care that extends specialty expertise, remote monitoring that enables more care at home, shared services that create scale, or infrastructure and resilience investments that protect access to essential services. 

The solution should follow the problem, not the other way around. Success should ultimately be measured by outcomes. Did the investment expand access, create capacity, simplify care delivery, strengthen sustainability, or meaningfully improve the experience of patients and the people delivering their care? 

Why should cybersecurity be viewed as an access-to-care issue? 

Jason Griffin 

Cybersecurity in rural healthcare has evolved into an access-to-care and operational resilience issue. 

When a cyberattack occurs at a large health system, patients may be redirected to other facilities. In rural communities with few local alternatives, what appears to be an IT problem can quickly become a clinical and community problem. 

That changes how rural organizations should approach cyber investments. Leaders need to understand which services must continue operating during an extended attack or outage and build resilience accordingly. 

Planned resilience includes strong identity and authentication controls, clinical continuity, recoverable backups, network segmentation, third-party risk management, incident response, and disciplined recovery processes. 

Cyber resilience is clinical resilience. If a cyberattack prevents essential care from being delivered to a community, cybersecurity is not solely the responsibility of the IT department. It is an organizational responsibility tied directly to care delivery. 

The takeaway: Technology should create capacity, not consume it 

Taken together, these perspectives point to a clear priority for rural healthcare leaders. Organizations need to maintain ownership of their strategy, priorities, governance, and outcomes, but they do not need to operate every technology capability themselves. 

Specialized areas such as cybersecurity, infrastructure, disaster recovery, EHR support and optimization, interoperability, and analytics may require expertise or scale that is difficult to sustain internally. Shared delivery models, including managed services, can give rural organizations access to specialized capabilities, scale, and ongoing support without requiring them to build every function in-house. The organization still owns the strategy, priorities, governance, and outcomes. 

The same principle should guide technology investment more broadly. Rural healthcare organizations do not need to replicate the technology environments of the country’s largest health systems. They need to make intentional investments that expand access, strengthen the workforce, improve care, reduce risk, and support long-term operations. 

Success is about having the right capabilities to serve the community sustainably. 

Build a more sustainable approach to rural health IT. 
Learn how Nordic can help your rural healthcare organization strengthen its technology strategies, modernize critical systems, and use managed services and specialized expertise to expand capacity, improve resilience, and support access to care.