The US health-care system is reaching its breaking point. Individuals, families, employees, employers, and public and private health insurance funders are all spending more for health care every year, with little improvement in the overall health of our communities. The United States has higher maternal and infant death rates than most other high-income countries. Rural and underserved areas have stubbornly high preventable illness and death from heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Recently, we have even seen the rise in outbreaks of measles, a preventable disease, in the underserved parts of many states, with an adult dying in New Mexico and two children dying in Texas this year.

An important part of the solution is expanding mobile health care to address the prevention and distribution problems that are causing the crisis. However, there are barriers to that expansion—reimbursement; regulation, licensing, and credentialing prerequisites; and a lack of data—that must be addressed in the health care system, state by state, for communities to access the care they need.

Why Mobile Health Care

To paraphrase mobile health-care leader Dr. Nancy Oriol, there are two main problems underlying the crisis. First, there is a prevention problem because the system focuses mostly on expensive disease cures instead of money-saving screening and preventative care. Second, there is a distribution problem: Immobile brick-and-mortar hospitals and offices can’t reach many Americans, and those facilities are struggling. More than 100 hospitals have closed over the past decade, and more are expected to close and reduce services in light of recent cuts to Medicaid. These flaws in the system cause small health problems to grow bigger and much more expensive to treat. We all pay for this in higher medical bills, insurance premiums, and taxes—not to mention the loss of family and friends. It is a bad deal.

An expanded mobile health care sector can address health-care system distribution and prevention problems in the following ways:

  • Reaching people where they live and work, and adapting to local health priorities. For example, rural Missouri’s Mobile Integrated Healthcare Network employs community paramedics and health workers to make regular home visits to high-risk patients who lack primary care access. They operate vehicles equipped to facilitate care at patients’ homes, even carrying mobile hotspots to enable telehealth visits for patients who lack internet access.

Read the full article about scaling mobile health care by Andrew Bendheim at Stanford Social Innovation Review.