In rural healthcare, leaders often wear many hats—and Chandra Anderson is no exception. As Chief Nursing and Quality Officer at Cozad Community Health System, she oversees nursing, pharmacy, nutrition services, home health, and hospice care. In addition to managing these departments and leading her team, she also runs the utilization review program and spearheads interoperability initiatives, which are crucial for maintaining comprehensive rural healthcare records.
For rural hospitals like Cozad in central Nebraska, where neighboring facilities can be 45 minutes or more apart, seamless information sharing is essential. Serving a regional market that includes Lexington, Gothenburg, and Callaway, Cozad frequently cares for patients who transition between facilities. To ensure high-quality, coordinated care, the team must have timely access to comprehensive health information from rural healthcare records.
Keeping up with evolving healthcare technology can be challenging in rural settings, but it’s often transformative. Chandra embraced the opportunity to collaborate with CyncHealth. “I’m a huge advocate for technology,” says Chandra. “CyncHealth has been incredibly supportive in helping us modernize and stay current. We’ve been fortunate to work with their team and the HIE—it’s really helped us move forward.”
This partnership has certainly paid off. By leveraging CyncHealth’s tools, Cozad has improved care coordination and ensured patients don’t get lost in transition of care. Access to longitudinal health records has been a game-changer, especially for maintaining accurate rural healthcare records. “My team loves logging into CyncHealth and getting that additional health information,” Chandra shares. “It helps us maintain a more complete medical record and ensures patients don’t fall through the cracks during care transitions.”
In 2024 alone, Cozad queried the Nebraska HIE over 5,000 times—2,000 of those in a single quarter. Nurses, pharmacists, and other staff rely on this data daily in rural Nebraska. In many cases, patients come from out of town and the Cozad team is unable to see a complete record. “It’s made a huge difference in how quickly we can provide care,” Chandra explains. “Before CyncHealth, we’d wait days for patient notes. Now, we can instantly access critical information like medications, ambulatory status, and pharmacy history. It’s been key, especially in handling rural healthcare records effectively.”
Ultimately, CyncHealth has empowered Cozad Community Health System to deliver more timely, informed, and high-quality care—regardless of where their patients come from. This is how rural healthcare records are managed efficiently, enabling facilities to thrive through innovation and collaboration.
About CyncHealth
CyncHealth is the health data utility and designated health information exchange (HIE) for Nebraska and western Iowa, connecting over 5 million lives and 1,135 facilities. On July 30, 2025, CyncHealth joined federal leaders and private-sector innovators at the White House, signing the CMS Aligned Network pledge to support the CMS Interoperability Framework. Learn more in the announcement: CyncHealth Leads the Way in Federal Health Technology Reform.
