The purpose of this study is to identify barriers to the adoption of new technology in rural settings. Specifically, this paper focuses on identifying and overcoming barriers to the adoption of a medication error reporting system in eight rural hospitals. Prior research has generally focused on barriers to the adoption of new technology in urban areas, medical centers, or large hospitals. The l...

Cycling is an important form of active transport and physical activity to provide substantial health benefits to the elderly. Among voluminous physical activity-related literature, few studies have investigated the correlates of active transport of the rural elderly in China. This study was the first attempt to investigate the impact of the household, personal, and environmental attributes on r...

In the hope of supporting rural economies, some rural planners suggest fostering food processing firms in rural areas. Locating close to the source of necessary agricultural commodities might give the processors an advantage. However, emerging patterns of product innovations, which affect demand, and process innovations, which lower costs, are tied to firm-level capacities in research and devel...

Recruiting rural African Americans for research presents special problems because of cultural differences, the view of researchers as cultural "outsiders", and transportation problems. This paper reports successful strategies in recruiting rural African American adults with type 2 diabetes for research studies. The researchers tested recruitment strategies commonly used in research, such as fly...

Several types of activities are mandated by grants that help support the state offices. First, state offices collect and disseminate information. State offices provide data and information to consumers, providers, policy makers, and other stakeholders. Information is disseminated to individual clients, as well as via newsletters. Topics are varied; examples include extent of underserved populat...

The paper discusses the institutional reforms for rural electrification (RE) in Thailand and Bangladesh and analyses the impacts of private sector participation in electricity generation and tariff reforms on the poor in Thailand. RE program in Thailand, initiated in 1977, increased electricity access by rural households from 7% in early 70s to 97% by 2000. In Bangladesh the RE program, initiat...

Socioeconomic trends and developments within the U.S. healthcare system have challenged rural hospitals' ability to maintain adequate operating margins and offer needed services. However, some hospitals have fared better in this negative environment than have others. To clarify factors that distinguish the most viable rural Catholic hospitals from the least viable, our study identified a group ...

The New South Wales Department of Health (NSW Health) wishes to make appropriate use of casemix data as inputs to the determination of funding levels for small rural hospitals. However, other factors such as hospital size and degree of isolation might need to be taken into account. The study reported here involved correlation of actual expenditures with those predicted by use of a casemix model...

Little is known about spatial inequalities and potential access to the food environment in rural areas. In this study, we assessed the food environment in a 6-county rural region of Texas (11,567 km2) through ground-truthed methods that included direct observation and on-site Global Positioning System technology to examine the relationship between neighborhood inequalities (e.g., socioeconomic ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this review was to identify how rural and urban food access differs across small food stores as well as the types of research strategies and methodologies that have been applied in each setting in the U.S. METHODS Manuscripts were included in the review if they were published in English over the past ten years, with a clear delineation between urban and/or rural, cond...