A significant share of employer worksites—manufacturing plants, logistics hubs, and increasingly, data center campuses—sits in rural or semi-rural geographies where the nearest clinic or urgent care may be a meaningful drive away. 80% of U.S. counties qualify as healthcare deserts. Since 2010, 182 rural hospitals nationally have either closed or converted to a model that excludes inpatient care, per the Chartis Center for Rural Health's 2025 State of the State report.
When an employee loses a shift to a long drive for a treatable issue, that's both an access failure and a productivity cost. The OnMed CareStation® addresses the connectivity side of that gap directly: it operates on dual broadband and satellite connectivity, so a facility's own internet reliability isn't what stands between a worker and care. That matters because 1 in 5 Americans lack access to viable broadband for telehealth—a gap that falls hardest on the same rural and semi-rural worksites described above.
A healthcare desert is a geographic area where residents face significant barriers to accessing basic medical care due to a shortage of providers, facilities, or both. Today, 80% of U.S. counties meet the criteria for a healthcare desert, leaving millions of Americans more than an hour from the nearest clinic or hospital. These areas are not limited to rural communities. They include urban and suburban neighborhoods, tribal lands, and correctional environments where structural gaps in the system have persisted for decades. The consequences are measurable: delayed diagnoses, undertreated chronic conditions, and emergency departments absorbing care that should have been delivered much earlier. Barriers can include provider shortages, appointment delays, transportation challenges, limited clinic availability, affordability concerns, and fragmented care delivery.
Rural worksites often sit far from the nearest clinic, and many rural clinics keep limited daytime hours that don't align with shift-based or off-hours work schedules, compounding the distance problem with a timing problem.
Since 2010, 182 rural hospitals nationally have either closed or converted to a model that excludes inpatient care, per the Chartis Center for Rural Health's 2025 State of the State report.
Every term here points to the same gap in healthcare access. See how the CareStation closes it.
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