By Elad Walach
Hospitals across the US are home to some of the most advanced technologies and treatment methods in the world. But larger facilities in urban areas tend to host the bulk of these advanced medical services, leaving more rural facilities playing catch up.
In rural areas of the US, hospitals tend to be smaller and more dispersed. Up to
20% of Americans live in rural areas, but only 11% of doctors are rural-based. Emergency healthcare in rural areas often relies on Critical Access Hospitals, small facilities that can provide acute care, negating the necessity of commuting long distance journeys via ambulatory service. Yet, these centers of care may not have the repertoire to provide the same level of care as larger urban based hospitals, and the difference in clinical outcomes depicts this truth.
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Studies consistently show increased mortality rates in the rural US; some research estimates that age-adjusted mortality in rural America is
as much as 33% higher than that of large metropolitan areas. As rural hospitals close and large metropolitan health centers deploy increasingly advanced technologies and treatments, this gap in clinical care may
only get worse.
Digging deeper into the data, one major difference in how rural and urban patients are treated is the degree to which advanced imaging is offered to these patients. Patients at rural emergency departments are
7% less likely to be given CT or MRI scans than their urban counterparts; that difference increases to 18% when looking specifically at Critical Access Hospitals.
Rural hospitals tend to have fewer radiologists per 100,000 people and struggle to recruit younger physicians who tend to settle in more desirable urban areas. As a result, rural domains are left with an inevitable shortage of talent. Even within health systems, disparities in health outcomes can exist between a medical hub and its respective spoke centers.
Imaging, as the first step of medical care for a whole range of critical and chronic conditions, was the natural entry point for AI to start in healthcare. Moving forward, AI may catalyze the genesis of change needed to improve health outcomes in the rural setting.
