President Trump declared that the U.S. will be “the world capital of artificial intelligence” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump’s commitment carries significant weight, given that he has already repealed a Biden-era executive order that aimed to monitor and regulate AI, which carried the risk of slowing our development of this technology compared to foreign competitors.
President Trump also recently announced a new joint venture between Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank that will provide up to $500 billion to advance AI in America. In highlighting the potential benefits of this investment, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison stated that AI had the potential to detect and treat cancers within 48 hours.
While the AI of today is predominantly used for activities like research, writing, and customizing images, the AI of tomorrow will save our lives. This brings us to another aspect of our healthcare system potentially nearing a revolution — our rural hospitals.
In the past month alone, states including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Oregon, and Mississippi have warned that their rural hospitals are in dire financial straits. This isn’t a “red state” problem or a “blue state” problem - an estimated 700 rural hospitals are at risk of shuttering nationwide, and more than half have already closed their maternity wards. Kaiser Family Foundation finds that, “operating margins were lower among hospitals in rural versus urban (nonmetropolitan versus metropolitan) areas (3.1% versus 5.4%, respectively) and were especially low among hospitals in rural areas that were not micropolitan areas (1.8%).” To state the obvious, a 1.8 percent profit margin is hardly a profit at all.
Compounding the challenges for facilities operating under these razor-thin profit margins is the issue of cybersecurity. Rural hospitals are considered prime targets for hackers because they often lack adequate security controls, and they tend to use more antiquated systems to house personally identifiable information (PII). Obtaining personal medical records and disrupting critical healthcare systems affords hackers maximum leverage given the severity of its consequences on either end. The number of ransomware attacks against the U.S. healthcare sector increased by 128% in 2023 alone, and studies reveal that such attacks gravely reduce hospital admissions and endangers lives.
Despite the obstacles, artificial intelligence presents new hope for our healthcare sector. Leading tech companies, including Microsoft, have begun piloting AI programs that have shown potential to strengthen the cyber capabilities of rural hospitals, reducing the frequency of these attacks and the economic impact of ransomware payments – which carry the additional risk of funding foreign adversaries.
AI will further revitalize rural hospitals by assisting in services even as basic as bookkeeping. By helping to reverse coding errors that could delay insurance reimbursement payments and weed out other costly inefficiencies, AI has enormous potential to streamline administrative tasks. This may not be the sexiest use case for AI, but such cost-saving measures inevitably stretch the ghastly-thin profit margins of these rural facilities, allowing them to provide next-level care to patients.
Considering the financial challenges faced by these facilities, the closure of maternity wards, and the widespread impact of this issue across the country, the Trump administration must recognize the national imperative to remove all regulatory roadblocks that hinder this technology from saving our healthcare sector.
Rural America elected Trump. They deserve to have access to care like the rest of us.
