ABSTRACT
In general, rural healthcare organizations, and especially rural community hospitals, have to deal with a number of locality-specific issues. One key challenge that they face is in trying to generate sufficient revenue in areas with low-population densities and higher percentages of elderly, poor residents. Rural hospitals also have difficulties in procuring enough skilled personnel. As a result, they sometimes find it difficult to operate efficiently and effectively. As a corollary to the first two problems, rural hospitals have problems optimizing their information technology (IT) and human resources (HR) infrastructures.
