Technology

COVID aid fuels telehealth expansion in rural America - Roll Call As rural hospitals deal with workforce shortages and declining populations, some say telehealth offers a chance to bridge the gap. Lauren Clason Roll Call

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Federal pandemic aid also helped slow the rate of rural hospital closures. But as facilities contend with lingering inflation, workforce shortages and declining populations, the pace of those closures is picking up again.

Telehealth offers a chance to bridge the gap in hospital deserts.

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The planet has broiled this summer, with July winning the unwelcome title of the hottest month since records began, in the nineteenth century. Indeed, climate scientists think that it was possibly the hottest month in the past 120,000 years. Given the rapid pace of climate change, however, July offered merely a taste of the heat to come. In 2015, world leaders established a goal to keep average global surface temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. In July, global temperatures breached that critical ceiling, if only briefly. Nearly 5,000 local heat and rainfall records were broken in the United States alone; globally, the number exceeded 10,000. And scientists anticipate that 2023 will clock in as the hottest year on record.