Despite all the astonishing advancements in medicine in the U.S. in recent years, policymakers and health care providers have yet to come up with a comprehensive solution for addressing rural health care—and as a result, millions of Americans across vast stretches of the country continue to be underserved. The reasons rural medicine has consistently lagged behind the rest of the U.S. health care system are complex, owing to an array of factors spanning socioeconomics, access to technology and connectivity, availability of qualified personnel, properly aligned financial incentives, and finally, stifling over-regulation and bureaucracy.
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But other countries—some of them with even far more challenging rural or remote populations—are proving that with the proper mix of innovation, technology and the ability to cut through red tape, a lot more can be done.
In global energy circles, there is no hotter market than Guyana, a tiny, English-speaking nation of less than a million inhabitants nestled between Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname on the north coast of South America. In 2015, ExxonMobil hit pay dirt in the country with one of the world’s biggest oil finds in decades, and now Guyana’s newfound riches are transforming the country into what some call the “Dubai of the Caribbean.” By 2027, Guyana will be the highest producer of crude per capita in the world.
Perhaps even more impressive than Guyana’s rags-to-riches story is its government’s commitment to deploying a significant slice of its oil profits towards an array of much-needed social programs, chief among them the improvement of the country’s tenuous health care delivery system. However, delivering quality health care services across the entirety of the Guyanese population is particularly thorny; over 90 percent of the country is covered by a blanket of dense primeval forests—an area larger than Washington State. Known locally as The Hinterland, this area is dotted by small indigenous communities—the majority with fewer than 400 inhabitants each. Many are only accessible by several days of river travel on small boats from regional population centers. The government estimates that 100,000 people – perhaps as much as 12 percent of the country’s entire population—live in these micro-settlements amid these rainforests.
Frank........