We’ve invested billions in EHRs. We’ve passed regulations, launched exchanges, built APIs, and declared “data liquidity” the future of care. Yet in 2026, clinicians are still piecing together incomplete patient histories. Continuity of care remains fragile. And nowhere is this felt more than in rural America.
The challenge isn’t clinical capability. It’s access to usable, complete patient information at the point of care. That reality matters more than ever as the federal government rolls out the Rural Health Transformation (RHT) Program, a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment intended to strengthen rural healthcare delivery across all 50 states.
A Historic Investment, Not a Silver Bullet
The RHT Program represents a significant and necessary commitment to rural health. States are being funded to modernize infrastructure, expand telehealth, address workforce shortages, and improve care delivery models. But, funding alone does not create interoperability. We’ve learned this lesson. It never has. After more than 20+ years of digital health investment, interoperability remains fragmented. It is often totally dependent on:
- Whether a patient has broadband access
- Whether they own or can use a smartphone or portal
- Whether their providers happen to be on compatible systems
- Whether a rural hospital still exists at all
Rural Healthcare Continues to Lose Ground, It’s Not Catching Up
Rural hospitals continue to close at alarming rates. Entire communities are losing local access to emergency care, specialists, and care continuity. When a hospital closes, medical records don’t magically follow patients. They become harder to retrieve, locked behind legacy systems, or lost altogether.
At the same time, digital health strategies often assume a level of access that simply doesn’t exist in rural America:
- Not every patient has reliable internet
- Not every patient uses patient portals
- Not every care setting can support real-time digital exchange
After more than 20 years of health IT investment, interoperability remains inconsistent, system-dependent, and often inaccessible to the very communities RHT aims to support. Digital strategies still assume reliable broadband, device access, and system participation. These are conditions that simply don’t exist everywhere.
The Reality on the Ground: Rural Health Is Still in Crisis
According to the 2025 Rural Health State of the State report from the Chartis Center for Rural Health, the rural healthcare safety net is under increasing strain.
- 46% of rural hospitals are operating at a financial loss
- 182 inpatient rural facilities have closed
- 432 more are considered vulnerable to closure
- Essential services are disappearing: 293 hospitals eliminated obstetrics and 424 stopped providing chemotherapy
Compounding these challenges, more than 60% of federally designated Health Professional Shortage Areas are rural. When a rural hospital closes, care doesn’t simply disappear. Patients dissapear as well. Some refuse to, or cannot travel to larger urban areas. Medical records become harder to retrieve, or lost altogether. No level of new funding can restore continuity of care if a patient’s history is inaccessible at the point of need.
Rural Health Needs Patient-Centric Continuity
Interoperability cannot depend solely on infrastructure, portals, or vendor participation. It must function with or without broadband, with or without aligned EHRs, when hospitals close, and when patients cross state lines or care settings. That requires a fundamentally different approach. One that treats the patient as the single source of truth, not the technology. This provides clinicians with immediate context and prevents rural patients from being dismissed, ignored, or refused a continuity of care model. Interoperability isn’t a future goal, it’s a current patient safety issue.
Until health information is portable, patient-owned, and accessible regardless of systems or connectivity, rural communities will continue to bear the cost of fragmented care.
MedKaz is the Answer!
In a healthcare landscape where systems change and hospitals disappear, MedKaz provides the one constant rural care has always needed: patient-owned records that work wherever care happens. One record. Any provider. Every visit. With or without internet. It’s simple, accessible, and effective—without costing billions or requiring massive infrastructure changes. If rural healthcare transformation is the goal, this is where continuity begins. Let’s talk.
