Artificial intelligence disease detection and care coordination platform Viz.ai announced Thursday a collaboration with the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) aimed at helping rural healthcare leaders better understand and implement AI tools across systems.
The newly announced collaboration will provide rural health systems with practical guidance on AI implementation through educational opportunities, case studies and other resources.
“Rural hospitals are essential lifelines for their communities, and they need solutions that understand their unique realities,” Brock Slabach, NRHA COO, said in a statement. “Viz.ai has demonstrated a commitment to advancing timely diagnosis and coordinated care. Through this partnership, we look forward to equipping rural healthcare leaders with innovative tools and education that can help strengthen access, improve outcomes and support long-term sustainability.”
The two organizations will also partner on creating a toolkit for systems, Viz.ai Chief Clinical Officer Andrew Ibrahim, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare.
Ibrahim said a “large amount” of his career has been centered around access to care, including for those in rural communities, and he has been “longitudinally involved” with the NRHA since giving a keynote speech at a 2016 meeting.
Rural hospitals are approximately 25% less likely to adopt new technologies, including AI, according to the company, citing November data from the American Hospital Association (AHA). Funding and access constraints, staff shortages and geographic barriers are among the factors delaying such implementation.
Ibrahim added that the influx of new AI companies can also be difficult to navigate. “It can be pretty overwhelming to a health system if you haven't implemented much AI to know what's a good company, what's a company that's not very good or tested,” he said.
Despite the implementation barriers, Ibrahim said the “best use case” of Viz’s stroke detection tool, approved by the FDA in 2018, is in rural communities.
“If you're in a hospital a couple hours away, the ability to know within a couple minutes [with] your CAT scan if you need to be transferred, can be all the difference in the patient's recovery from a stroke, so they can get timely treatment,” he said.
Moreover, there’s “a lot of alignment” between Viz.ai’s mission and what’s important to rural hospitals, according to Ibrahim.
“Rural hospitals want support in really knowing who's safe to stay local and who really needs to be transported,” Ibrhaim said. “And how do you strengthen that relationship between the rural hospital and the larger center they need to get to? That's been a gap that Viz has filled."
Viz.ai recently launched the first agentic platform—dubbed Viz Agent Studio—for health systems to build and deploy their own customizable care pathways. The tool allows healthcare organizations to translate clinical guidelines into workflows, then deploy and scale them "across the enterprise using natural language," executives said.
Since the company’s 2016 launch, its platform has been deployed at 2,000 hospitals across the U.S., a scale that CEO and co-founder Chris Mansi, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare in March covers “two-thirds” of the country’s population. Ibrahim said “about a quarter” of hospitals with deployed technology are rural.
“Our mission and our platform is about timely access [for] everyone,” Ibrahim said.