Workshop on AI for Rural Health

The Health Care Engineering Systems Center of The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hosted a Workshop on AI for Rural Health with invited talks from the  Illinois Department of Public Health , the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois Chicago, and OSF OnCall Digital Health of OSF HealthCare.

The aim of the workshop was to build alliances and collaborations and start the process of creating a research community with common goals.

         • Identifying a set of challenges, research questions, and problems which could advance the state of rural health

         • Creating common infrastructure for conducting healthcare research with rural populations statewide

         • Developing collaborative teams that could pursue a variety of funding opportunities

         • Developing the healthcare workforce in the State of Illinois to more effectively incorporate AI methods and position practitioners for greater impact

Attendees from the aforementioned institutions and also from the University of Illinois Extension, UIUC-Prairie Research Institute,  UIUC-McKinley Health Center, UIUC-College of Veterinary Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, University of Illinois College of Medicine of Chicago, Rockford and Peoria, Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Chicago ARC, divided into groups to discuss solutions that leverage AI in healthcare  to overcome health disparities, improve care for substance abuse disorders, expand services for mental and women’s health, and to add new tools for population health research.

The Health Care Engineering Systems Center pledges continuation of the discourse to build an interconnected research community that leverages the strengths of our collective activities to employ AI for the improvement of the healthcare delivery in the rural and underserved areas of the State of Illinois.