source: Chartis 2025 “Rural Health state of the state”

Why is that?

• Smaller, aging populations mean lower patient volumes.
• Heavy reliance on Medicare and Medicaid leads to thinner margins.
• Workforce shortages drive up costs and limit service lines.
• Closures of OB, oncology, and other departments reduce both access and revenue.

The result: communities lose local care options, and hospitals struggle to remain anchors of health.

At HealthOcta, we’re building VideoConsults to help rural hospitals retain patients, expand specialty coverage, and strengthen their long-term sustainability. We believe technology should reduce the pressure, not add to it.

How VideoConsults helps here?

Problem: Low patient volumes + service line closures make it hard to justify onsite specialists.
VideoConsults helps by: Allowing rural hospitals to access specialists on-demand (cardiology, ID, endocrinology, etc.) without the fixed cost of hiring full-time staff. Patients can be kept local rather than transferred out.

Problem: High transfer rates = lost revenue + fragmented care.
VideoConsults helps by: Giving ERs and inpatient units a direct specialist connection. Many cases that would have been transferred can now be managed locally, keeping both revenue and trust in the community hospital.

Problem: Workforce shortages, recruitment difficulty, and burnout.
VideoConsults helps by: Extending the reach of the limited staff they do have. A single hospitalist can lean on specialty support, reducing decision fatigue and improving confidence in care.

Problem: Financial pressure from payer mix and sustainability issues.
VideoConsults helps by: Creating a flexible, scalable specialty access model that grows (or shrinks) with patient volume, no sunk cost in trying to sustain a low-volume service line.

Problem: Community trust erodes when services vanish.
VideoConsults helps by: Preserving access to advanced care close to home, reinforcing the hospital’s role as the anchor of the community.

What makes VideoConsults unique in how we approach the solution…

Unlike outsourced telehealth services, VideoConsults is not a replacement for your team, it’s an infrastructure layer that hospitals license and control. We’re a specialty access fabric that brings to you integrated devices, structured intake and telehealth tools. Add to it your own specialists or specialists you contract with. We even have a directory of specialists we could refer to you.

• Clinical control stays local: Hospital leadership decides which specialists to connect, whether it’s their own employed physicians or contracted partners.

• Flexible staffing: Rural hospitals can choose to partner with regional hubs, independent specialists, or IDNs, and swap or add partners without changing the platform.

• Technology + compliance backbone: We bring structured intake, EMR-lite documentation, device integration, and even offer back-office support, but the hospital leads care delivery.

Sustainable model: This puts community hospitals in the driver’s seat, they decide where to invest scarce resources while still ensuring specialty coverage.

Too often, “tech solutions” create new problems – more workflows, more costs. For rural hospitals already stretched thin, that’s not sustainable. We built VideoConsults with a different principle: technology should lighten the load. By simplifying specialty access, reducing transfers, and fitting seamlessly into existing operations, our platform helps hospitals strengthen care without adding complexity or taking control away from leadership. In addition, VideoConsults is designed to be flexible for every budget. Tap to see more about the VideoConsults platform or talk to us about it.