Viz.ai, an artificial intelligence-powered disease detection and care coordination platform, on Thursday announced a partnership with the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) to help local healthcare leaders better understand and implement AI tools across their systems.
A newly announced partnership will provide local health systems with practical guidance on AI adoption through educational opportunities, case studies, and other resources.
“Rural hospitals are essential lifelines for their communities and require solutions that understand their unique local realities,” NRHA Chief Operating Officer Brock Slabach said in a statement. “Viz.ai has been committed to advancing timely diagnosis and coordinated care, and through this partnership, we look forward to providing rural health leaders with innovative tools and education that can enhance access, improve outcomes, and support long-term sustainability.”
Dr. Andrew Ibrahim, Viz.ai’s chief clinical officer, told Fierce Healthcare that the two organizations will also collaborate on creating a toolkit for the system.
Ibrahim said a “large part” of his career has focused on access to care, including for people in rural areas, and he has had a “long-term commitment” to NRHA since delivering the keynote address at the 2016 conference.
Rural hospitals are about 25% less likely to adopt new technologies such as AI, the company said, citing November data from the American Hospital Association (AHA). Funding and access constraints, staff shortages, and geographic barriers are some of the factors slowing down such implementation.
Ibrahim added that the influx of new AI companies can also be difficult to navigate. “If you don’t have a lot of AI adoption, it can be pretty difficult for a health system to know what’s a good company and what’s not so good or hasn’t been tested,” he said.
Despite barriers to implementation, Ibrahim said the “best use case” for Viz’s stroke detection tool, which was approved by the FDA in 2018, is in rural areas.
“If a patient is admitted to a hospital several hours away, being able to know within minutes from a CAT scan whether a transfer is required can make a huge difference in a patient’s recovery from stroke and access to timely treatment,” he said.
Additionally, Ibrahim says there is “a lot of alignment” between Viz.ai’s mission and what’s important to rural hospitals.
“Local hospitals are looking for help to really know who is local and safe and who really needs to be transported,” Ibraheim says. “And how do we strengthen the relationship between rural hospitals and the large centers they need access to? That was the gap that Viz filled.”
Viz.ai recently launched its first agent platform (called Viz Agent Studio) to help health systems build and deploy their own customizable care pathways. The tool allows healthcare organizations to transform clinical guidelines into workflows that can be deployed and scaled “throughout the enterprise using natural language,” executives said.
Since the company’s launch in 2016, its platform has been deployed in 2,000 hospitals across the country, covering “two-thirds” of the nation’s population, CEO and co-founder Chris Mansi, MD, told Fierce Healthcare in March. Ibrahim said “about a quarter” of hospitals implementing the technology are in rural areas.
“Our mission and platform is to provide timely access to everyone,” Ibrahim said.
