AI – an exciting time for healthcare, but much work needed to impact rural areas
Artificial Intelligence – or AI – strikes a different chord with different people. There’s the argument of job displacement, the fear of environmental impacts and more.
In healthcare, AI can make a huge difference in how patients receive treatment – especially those in rural areas. But those differences only happen if the technology is applied correctly.
According to a peer-reviewed commentary in The Journal of Rural Health, AI transforms rural healthcare by enhancing telehealth through real-time, data-driven decision support, facilitating earlier intervention for chronic diseases.
In their commentary, titled “Artificial Intelligence in rural health care – A framework for responsible adoption, readiness and access,” Scott Helle with the Kentucky Office of Rural Health and Dr. Qian Huang with the Center for Rural Health and Research at East Tennessee State University, say AI tools help bridge the workforce gap by reducing administrative burdens, enabling local staff to focus on patient care and supporting remote diagnostics for chronic disease management.
But – keeping in mind the major changes needed in mountainous, rural areas like Eastern Kentucky – the researchers also propose a framework to make AI work. They emphasize that tools must be designed to reduce – rather than widen – existing rural-urban health disparities. They outline a three-pillar approach that includes responsible adoption, readiness and access – all designed to address limited data and infrastructure deficits and the need for special resource management in rural settings.
AI and telehealth
“My understanding of AI in healthcare is specific to how it works with telehealth,” said Rob Sprang, director of Kentucky TeleCare at UK HealthCare. “And at the moment, the primary application is its use in reading radiology images.”
Sprang said it has all moved very slowly over the years, “but AI can now read diabetic retina images that are taken in ophthalmology and primary care offices. It does not require an ophthalmologist specializing in retinal disease.”
He said this is one of the first AI applications that has been approved for payment by insurance, “which is the gold standard to get AI fully integrated; it has to be a service that is reimbursable.”
Sprang said there are up to four other eye-related imaging types that are expected to be reimbursed in the next six to 12 months.
“This is just the beginning of AI integration into healthcare delivery,” he said.
With diabetic retinal screening, the patient knows the results within a minute of the image being taken, so they know if they have a problem, Sprang said. “The reimbursement is also typically paid to the location that takes the picture rather than to an MD that reads it from somewhere else, so the provider that purchases the camera and takes the images benefits from the reimbursement.”
AI and administrative task
Other peer-reviewed studies, like one published in the Journal of Rural Health done by the Kentucky Office of Rural Health, detail how AI can stretch rural care teams with things like ambient charting that reduce documentation times, freeing them up. But articles warn about the “rural blind spot,” how algorithms designed for well-funded urban hospitals often fail in rural populations, requiring the need for rural-specific health data to prevent the digital divide from widening even more.
The Telehealth Resource Center, a federally funded network for 14 centers to help healthcare organizations sustain programs, says AI’s biggest impact in rural settings won’t be flashy robotic surgeries – it will be streamlined administrative tasks.
As part of Kentucky’s almost $213 million Rural Health Transformation Program funding, statewide rollouts will target rural institutions, integrating AI-driven remote monitoring and diagnostics into rural clinics across the state. Some hospitals in rural Kentucky are implementing AI platforms through collaborations with UK HealthCare’s Kentucky Neuroscience Institute to drastically accelerate automated stroke detection close to patients’ homes.
UK HealthCare also joined in a partnership with Microsoft to scale AI assistance throughout its infrastructure in order to automate scheduling, route test results and draft physician documentation. UK says this change has “slashed note-taking time and skyrocketed same-day clinical note completion rates to over 80%,” and that major medical systems are embedding these tools permanently into electronic health records.
In March, it was announced that Owensboro Health is piloting a platform developed by Optum and Microsoft to specifically automate highly repetitive coding, billing and claims workflows. The technology can capture a discussion between a patient and doctor and generate notes in real time. It can also detect documentation issues that can affect coding, which can in turn affect billing and reimbursements.
Looking to the future
Lawmakers spent time during the 2026 legislative session debating several bills aimed at setting guardrails around artificial intelligence in healthcare.
UK is also leading a collaborative effort with Bluegrass Community and Technical College and Berea College to build “EducateAI” curricula. Supported by a $1.85 million National Science Foundation award, the initiative focuses on teaching undergraduate medical, nursing and technical students how to responsibly operate AI-powered diagnostic and clinic tools.
AI is also being used in drug development. According to The AI Daily, as of this year, there are more than 173 AI-originated drug compounds actively in clinical trials. This is a massive leap from three AI compounds a decade earlier. It also says that through 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared 1,451 AI-enabled medical devices for commercial medical use.
“It is a very exciting time,” Sprang said.
Bobbie Curd is a freelance journalist based in Danville, Kentucky. Her stories appear in a variety of area publications, and her experience includes reporting and editing duties at both daily and weekly newspapers. This story is part of a package about health care issues in Eastern Kentucky produced with a grant from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.