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By Max Gelber
My cousin Ben spent summers in rural Georgia at an overnight camp. Once, when trying to ask a girl to a dance while mountain biking, he fell, breaking his nose and his pride along the way. He needed immediate medical attention, which in upstate Georgia was an hour away. Ben was lucky; many rural Americans are not. In the 2 decades since Ben’s tumble, not much has changed in terms of healthcare accessibility in rural areas.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence could bridge the healthcare accessibility challenges facing our nation’s rural communities, yet it feels like the government’s commitment to developing innovative and effective healthcare AI solutions is little more than an afterthought. By way of example, the Department of Defense saw 403 new potential AI contracts totaling $4 billion. Compare that toto second place, Health and Human Services, which received 15 AI contracts, totaling $6.3 million. In one year, the federal government’s investment in AI-driven weapons increased so much that federal investment into other departments looked like a rounding error, even though it is becoming clear that AI is a lifeline for rural Americans in need of medical care.
Since 2010, a CDC study estimated that six million people have lost their lives from preventable disease and sickness, disproportionately coming from rural communities. Rural communities make up 20% of our population, yet bear an outsized burden of our healthcare inaccessibility. That same study found more than half of early deaths from unintentional injury and chronic lower respiratory disease in rural areas were preventable.
Much of the problem is geography combined with a deficit in available healthcare expertise. Rural Americans have to travel 24 miles for a basic diagnosis and over 40 for specialized treatment. This is expected to worsen as 30% of rural hospitals are at risk of closing due to a lack of funding. Two and a half million rural Americans have little to no access to private transportation, relying on 187 of the worst public bus systems in the country. If they need medical help, they have a day’s worth of travel for a basic checkup.
While AI won’t build roads or expand our public transit systems in rural communities, researchers at the University of Florida are working on a solution. They are one of thirteen research and development teams in the Platform Accelerating Rural Access to Distributed and Integrated Medical Care (PARADIGM) project. PARADIGM’s end goal: hospital service in a car. Each team has its purpose, UF being one piece of the puzzle. UF’s role in the PARADIGM project uses an AI system called Multi-Tags.
Multi-tags –once completed– will be integrated into a fleet of electric vehicles to bring the medical expertise of a hospital to the doors of individuals in rural communities, enabling healthcare workers to perform clinical procedures directly, reduce training requirements, increase efficiency, lower costs, and improve patient outcomes. Inside the vehicles, the AI Multi-Tags system will provide intelligent task guidance, providing real-time prompts that can turn a generalist into a “just-in-time specialist.”
In Washington state, Anna Zamora-Kapoor is studying how to integrate AI and machine learning for cancer early detection in rural areas where cancer mortality rates are higher than in urban areas, aiming for cancers with effective “interventions for prevention, early detection, and treatment.” She aims to use AI-generated text messages to help patients eligible for a low-dose CT scan.
These projects demonstrate the potential Artificial Intelligence holds, especially for communities that have long been neglected. Our nation has yet to obtain the true benefit of these promising possibilities. The head of UC San Francisco’s Department of Medicine, Bob Wachter, explained, “When I look for examples of … true AI and machine learning that’s really making a difference, they’re pretty few and far between. It’s pretty underwhelming.”
While the private sector will undoubtedly pursue profit-based solutions that move the ball, our government needs to truly lead and spur the kind of innovation necessary to address our great health care challenges.
