Rural patients stay wary as AI enters their care: KFF
CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES — Rural Americans remain deeply skeptical of artificial intelligence (AI) in their personal healthcare, even as federal officials promote the technology as a fix for rural provider shortages.
Trust gaps slow rural AI adoption
Tara Haffner, a resident of Hot Springs, South Dakota, voiced the sentiment plainly. “I get artificial intelligence for certain things, but for personal healthcare — no,” Haffner said.
The city of roughly 3,400 people is served by a 25-bed independent hospital, a setting typical of the rural United States, where communities depend on lean, locally operated facilities.
A KFF Health News investigation found only 26 peer-reviewed studies on AI in rural U.S. healthcare published between 2010 and April 2025.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Director Mehmet Oz has publicly backed AI as a way to extend care in underserved regions, yet CMS has no standardized framework for tracking AI health outcomes in the field.
The evidence base for rural AI adoption remains thin even as federal officials push the technology as a solution.
Rural providers weigh AI contract risks
Qian Huang, assistant professor at the Center for Rural Health and Research at East Tennessee State University, said community dynamics raise the stakes for every technology decision in rural settings.
“In rural communities, trust and a personal relationship is essential,” Huang said. Huang noted that limited resources make failed investments especially costly for under-resourced providers.
A 2025 ARISE report, drawing on Stanford and Harvard research, found that many AI health tools reach patients before being adequately evaluated.
Jordan Everson, assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Family Medicine, said rural hospitals carry heightened exposure when evaluating AI vendor agreements.
“The risk of signing contracts that rural healthcare organizations come to regret is pretty high,” Everson said in the KFF Health News investigation.
With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act projecting $900 billion in Medicaid reductions over a decade, rural hospitals have shrinking margins to absorb failed technology investments.
As rural health systems face tighter federal reimbursements and widening staffing shortages, healthcare outsourcing has emerged as a practical path for sustaining core operations.
Administrative functions such as medical coding, prior authorization processing, and telehealth scheduling are areas where business process outsourcing (BPO) has helped lean rural facilities extend capacity without adding to already-strained clinical teams.
For rural hospitals skeptical of unproven AI contracts, outsourcing back-office workflows to established partners offers a lower-risk route to operational efficiency.
Administrative outsourcing can be evaluated on clear cost and throughput benchmarks from day one, a distinction that matters when a community depends on one facility to meet all of its healthcare needs.
Related news
- 66% of patients don’t trust AI in healthcare: report · 11 Aug
- Rural U.S. healthcare struggles with tech updates as budgets tighten · Mar 2025
- Rural telehealth needs innovation beyond technology, experts say · Oct 2025
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