Access to health care in rural communities is challenged by workforce shortages. Nurse practitioners (NPs) have been filling the gap created by physician migration into specialty areas. Flex hospital legislation allows critical access hospitals (CAHs) to staff the emergency department with NPs without on-site physicians. NP education often lacks emergency and trauma curriculum, resulting in gaps in practice expectations and significant role transition stress and turnover. The purpose of this project was to construct from the scholarly literature a transition-to-practice residency program to support NP's in providing emergency department care in the CAH. The limbo to legitimacy theory guided the design and implementation of this project. Expected outcomes from this project include increased quality of care, increased patient safety, increased NP job satisfaction, and decreased turnover. The quality improvement initiative engaged an interprofessional team of 8 institutional leaders who designed the residency program and curriculum modules and the secondary products necessary to implement and evaluate the project. The project expands the understanding of the on-boarding needs of rural NPs and produces outcome data to evaluate results. Recommendations include collaboration between health care organizations and institutions of higher learning to promote postgraduate emergency care education leading to post-masters certificate or Doctor of Nursing Practice with emergency care subspecialization.

Program Objective: to train rural physicians how to use PDAs and the ePocrates database Setting: Tennessee rural critical access hospitals Participants: physicians Program: This patient safety initiative was a collaboration between the Tennessee Hospital Association (THA) and the Universities of Southern Maine, Minnesota, and North Dakota, and the Maine Rural Health Research Center, Upper Midwest Rural Health Research Center, QSource (Tennessee QIO), eight small rural Tennessee hospitals and BlueCross/BlueShield of Tennessee (funder). Because of THA’s knowledge of the East Tennessee State University Quillen College of Medicine Library (QCOML) through state conferences, QCOML was asked to conduct the training for the PDA segment of the project. Main Results: The goal was to provide a PDA for every hospital prescriber in eight small rural Tennessee hospitals. The project provided a Palm TX device, a two year subscription to the full suite of ePocrates software and training. One hundred-thirty clinicians were trained in PDA/ePocrates. Retraining was provided at each site as needed. Evaluation: evaluation was conducted by a 4–6 month user’s survey, usage data from ePocrates (sync, look-ups) and evaluation based on the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Survey. Conclusion: Physicians were pleased with the PDAs and indicated that the devices positively influenced their patient care. This type of cooperative venture exposes the talents of medical librarians to new populations and opens up opportunities for further collaboration.

Background: Critical Care Nurses have previously noted obstacles in caring for dying patients. Obstacles noted by nurses working in more urban settings have been reported. What is not known is the obstacles to providing end-of-life (EOL) care as perceived by nurses working in Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs). Objective: To determine the stories/experiences related to obstacles in providing EOL care as reported by nurses working in CAHs. Methods: This was an exploratory, cross-sectional study. Previous quantitative data has been reported. Documentation of the qualitative stories/experiences of nurses working in CAHs related to obstacles to providing EOL care for dying patients and their families. Results: Sixty-four CAH nurses provided 96 categorizable responses. Two major categories emerged related to either Family, Physician, & Ancillary staff issues or Nursing, Environment, Protocols, and Miscellaneous issues. Issues related to family behaviors included families insisting on futile care, disagreeing about DNR/DNI orders, issues with out-of-town family members, or even family members who suggested to the nurse to hasten the death of their family member. Physician behaviors related to providing false hope, dishonest communication, continuing futile treatments, or not ordering pain medications. Nursing issues included not having enough time to provide EOL care, already knowing the patient/family, or actions of compassion for the dying patient and family. Conclusion: Family issues continue to be obstacles to providing EOL care for nurses regardless of urban or rural setting. Physician behaviors are also consistent regardless of setting. Education of family members regarding issues with EOL care in ICUs is challenging because it is likely the families first experience with ICU terminology and technology. Further research into EOL care in CAHs is needed.

Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) – the predominant type of hospital operating in rural areas – play an integral role in the US healthcare system, providing care for over 7 million rural residents each year who might otherwise have no local access to urgent care or inpatient services. This dissertation examines three aspects of care delivery in CAHs – effectiveness, cost/efficiency, and access – each of which has separate implications for policy and practice. The first study addresses effectiveness and evaluates the performance of CAHs on specific patient safety indicators compared to small Prospective Payment System (PPS) hospitals. A total of 35,674 discharges from 136 non-federal general hospitals with fewer than 50 beds were included in the analyses: 14,296 from 100 CAHs and 21,378 from 36 PPS hospitals. Outcome measures included six bivariate indicators of adverse events of surgical care that were developed from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Patient Safety Indicators. Multiple logistic regression models were developed to examine the relationship between hospital adverse events and CAH status. The results indicated that compared to PPS hospitals, CAHs are less likely to have any observed (unadjusted) adverse event on all six indicators, four of which are statistically significant. After adjusting for patient mix and hospital characteristics, CAHs perform better on three of the six indicators. Accounting for the number of discharges eliminated the differences between CAHs and PPS hospitals in the likelihood of adverse events across all indicators except one. Tele-emergency (tele-ED) services can address several challenges facing emergency departments (EDs) in rural areas. The second study investigates access and characterizes the impact of a rural-ED-based telemedicine program on discharge disposition in terms of patient transfer, local hospital admission, and routine discharge. This study tests the hypothesis that telemedicine enhances access by allowing patients to receive care in the local community, and does so by looking at the probability of transfer and local admissions before and after telemedicine was implemented in CAHs. The results indicate that in the post-telemedicine period, patients were 38% less likely to be admitted to the local inpatient facility than to be routinely discharged [aOR=0.62, 95%CI=(0.57,0.67)] after adjusting for age, sex, race, time of visit, clinical diagnosis, CPT code, number of diagnoses, and admitting hospital. The third study addresses cost and efficiency by modeling the financial implications of using the same telemedicine program to avoid transfers and estimating the costs and benefits associated with tele-ED implementation in CAHs. Analysis is based on 9,048 tele-ED encounters generated by the Avera eEmergency program in 85 rural hospitals across seven states between October 2009 and February 2014. For each non-transfer patient, physicians indicated whether the transfer was avoided because of tele-ED activation. The cost-benefit analysis is conducted from the hospital, patient, and societal perspectives, and includes technology costs, local hospital revenues, and patient-associated savings. The results show that 1,175 avoided transfers could be attributed to tele-ED. From a rural hospital perspective, tele-ED costs around $1,739 to avoid a single transfer but saves approximately $5,563 in avoided transportation and indirect patient costs. From a societal perspective, tele-ED results in a net savings of $3,823 per avoided transfer while accounting for tele-ED technology costs, hospital revenues, and patient-associated savings. This study highlights various stakeholder perspectives on the financial impact of tele-ED in avoiding patient transfers in rural EDs. Telemedicine has the potential to reduce the number of transfers of ED patients and generate some revenue for rural hospitals despite associated technology costs, while incurring substantial patient savings.

The formation of multi-hospital systems represents one of the largest structural changes in the hospital industry. As of 2008, system affiliated hospitals outnumbered stand alone hospitals 2511 to 2167 and the percentage of system affiliated rural hospitals has increased dramatically from 24.8% in 1983 to 42.2% in 2008 (based on AHA data for non-federal acute care general hospitals). The effects of system membership on hospital performance have been of great interest to health care researchers, but the majority of research on multi-hospital systems has either focused exclusively on urban facilities or pooled urban and rural facilities in the same sample, and thus failed to allow for potential differences in membership effects between urban and rural hospitals. The result is that the effect of system membership on rural hospital performance has remained largely unexplored, creating a gap in the body of health services research. The objectives of this study are both theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, this study is intended to be a deliberate empirical application of contingency theory, which is the one major organizational theory that seeks to explain variations in organizational performance as its fundamental purpose. Empirically, this study seeks to explore the relationship between rural hospital system membership and rural hospital performance, taking into account the environment of the rural hospital and the structure of the multi-hospital system to which it belongs. The study sample consists of 1010 non-federal, short-term, acute care general rural hospitals with consistent system membership and critical access hospital (CAH) status from 2004 to 2008. Hospital economic performance is represented by the dependent variables of hospital total margin and a productive efficiency score calculated using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Four contingent pairs containing measures for environmental munificence, system membership, the presence of local system partners, the presence of hierarchical system partners, and CAH status, were used to measure a hospital’s fit between environment and structure. Regression analysis was used to determine the relationship between hospital performance and the fit between a hospital’s environment and its organizational/system structure. Results of the analysis indicate that hospitals with a better fit have significantly higher total margins, but results for productive efficiency were largely insignificant.