America’s Forgotten Utility: Hope for Healthcare Access
September 9, 2025
Imagine if 80% of American counties had inconsistent electricity. Or if 120 million Americans had sporadic or no access to clean water. Imagine if the lucky few still faced outages lasting an average of 31 to 67 days.
We’d call it a national emergency. We’d mobilize. We’d rebuild.
That’s exactly what’s happening with healthcare. The system is collapsing around us, and somehow, we’ve just accepted it. We are America, and we can do better.
The Access “Blackout”
Healthcare access isn’t just broken in rural America—it’s broken everywhere.
• 120+million Americans—1 in 3—lack adequate access to care.
• 80% of U.S. counties have medical deserts.
• 33% of rural hospitals are at risk of closing.
• 31 days—that’s the average wait for a doctor’s appointment. In some specialties, the wait exceeds two months.
• The national average wait in the Emergency Room is 3 hours, with some hospitals in more urban areas reporting median waits of 8 hours or more.
So let’s be clear with terminology: “underserved” doesn’t just mean small towns or rural ZIP codes.
It means:
• Sitting eight hours in an ER because your child has an ear infection.
• Missing a day’s wages just to see a doctor.
• Driving two hours for urgent care.
• Living in a major city where getting an appointment is a months-long wait.
Underserved is underserved—no matter your ZIP code or your net worth.
Why Aren’t Traditional Care and Telehealth Enough?
We’ve tried to solve access through two main models: traditional brick-and-mortar clinics and virtual care (telehealth). Both are important, but both have hit their limits.
Traditional care? Collapsing under staff shortages, rising clinic costs, and an aging physician workforce nearing retirement. Traditional in-person care can’t scale and is at a breaking point.
Telehealth? Adoption is less than 8%, and it can’t diagnose what requires an actual exam. There are no scans, vitals, or diagnostics of any kind. And millions are left out without viable broadband or a private space for a consultation.
The result? Patients in the middle—with no access, no answers, and no way forward.
What’s missing is a new layer of infrastructure—something that blends the rapid scalability of telehealth with the trust and comprehensiveness of in-person care.
Building America’s Healthcare Grid
At OnMed, we believe healthcare should be treated like electricity or clean water: a utility every American can rely on.
That’s why we’re building the OnMed Grid—a national health infrastructure that makes sense for America.
• Access Points: Our CareStations are compact “clinics in a box”—private, tech-enabled, and deployable anywhere with an outlet. Schools, workplaces, community centers, transportation hubs—you name it. They bring reliable care closer to where people live and work.
• Service Layer: Behind every CareStation is a clinician network that triages, treats, or routes patients to the optimal site of care. With vitals, biometrics, and high-definition devices, the vast majority of patients are fully diagnosed without requiring an outbound specialist referral.
• Infrastructure Approach: Think of CareStations like nodes all connected by power lines or water mains—extending care into places traditional healthcare has abandoned. This isn’t tech for tech’s sake. This is technology in service of people.
Why It Matters
When people can’t reliably get care, the consequences ripple across every part of society.
• Economic cost: Businesses lose an estimated $575 billion annually in productivity because of poor employee health. Payers waste $30-50 billion treating non-emergencies in the ER. Another $320+ billion is lost annually to preventable complications from unmanaged chronic conditions like Diabetes, Heart Disease, COPD, and Hypertension.
• Hospital strain: Emergency rooms overflow with cases that never should’ve been emergencies. Providers burn out. Systems bend until they break.
• Public health threats: Delayed care fuels the spread of chronic disease—and ensures we’ll be unprepared for the next pandemic.
Our Call to Action
America has never backed down from hard problems. We don’t shrug our shoulders and say, “too difficult.” We invent. We innovate. We rebuild.
It’s time we treated healthcare like the utility it is. It’s time we build the OnMed Grid.
Because underserved is underserved—and every American deserves reliable access to care.
Learn more and check out our CareStation Experience here.
References
• U.S.Department of Health & Human Services, Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA)
• Merritt Hawkins Physician Appointment Wait Times Survey
• American Hospital Association (AHA) Rural Hospital Closures Data
• Integrated Benefits Institute (IBI) Productivity Cost of Poor Health
• UnitedHealthGroup Report, The Potential Savings from Avoidable Emergency Department Visits
• RAND Corporation/Health Affairs (2021)
• Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC)
About OnMed
OnMed is the premier tech-enabled hybrid care company partnering with public and private organizations to reimagine healthcare access and improve health equity in communities across the country. With its patented CareStations (Winner of the CES 2025 Twice Pick’s Award for Tech that’s changing the world), OnMed combines the best elements of traditional primary, urgent, and post-acute care facilities with virtual telemedicine to deliver convenient, affordable care to underserved communities. OnMed licenses its cutting-edge technology and care delivery model to governments, employers, colleges, healthcare provider systems, payors, and high-traffic venues. OnMed is paving the way for everyday healthcare, everywhere. Learn more at www.onmed.com.
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