Studies have revealed that coverage for treatment of mental illness often does not match that provided for other medical conditions, causing advocates to pressure Capitol Hill to enforce laws and pass new ones to reduce disparities in care.

But advocates this week took a different route: Targeting doctors, teachers, parents and others in the general public who know someone with a mental illness, with the release of a guidebook offering details on mental disorders and how to get help treating them.

A common perception in the health care industry is that the underlying cultural environment limits technological advances in safety and efficiency. Following this logic, no significant advances can be made until major cultural changes occur. However, what if technology was not necessarily limited by culture, but, if applied correctly, could actually be used to drive a desired cultural change?

In 2005, VitalSmarts and the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) published a groundbreaking report called Silence Kills. They found that "among 1,700 nurses, physicians, clinical-care staff, and administrators, more than half witnessed their coworkers break rules, make mistakes, fail to support others, demonstrate incompetence, show poor teamwork, act disrespectfully, or micromanage. Specifically, 84 percent of doctors observed colleagues who took dangerous shortcuts when caring for patients and 88 percent worked with people who showed poor clinical judgment."

There are more than 4,700 hospitals in the U.S, spread about evenly between urban and rural areas. But that number has been dwindling.

More than 100 hospitals have closed since 2010, and the pace has quickened in the past couple of years. Hospitals are closing at about the same rate in urban and rural areas, but health care analysts say the effect often is more pronounced in small towns, where residents typically must travel farther to get to the next nearest hospital.

After 45 years of providing health care in rural Missouri, Sac-Osage Hospital is being sold piece by piece.

Ceiling tiles are going for 25 cents, the room doors for an average of less than $4 each, the patient beds for $250 apiece. Soon, the remnants of the hospital that long symbolized the lifeblood of Osceola, population 923, will be torn to the ground.