Dr. Kegler Shares What’s Going on in the Rural South

Dr. Michelle Kegler currently serves as both a professor and Director of the Emory Prevention Research Center at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Her research focuses on chronic disease prevention, with an emphasis on cancer prevention.

Much of Dr. Kegler’s research uses a community-based, participatory project in southwest Georgia encompassing two main areas: healthy eating and tobacco control. Healthy eating includes weight gain prevention and creating healthier home environments. Tobacco control includes preventing second-hand smoke exposure in children and non-smokers. Both efforts use the help of health coaches.

“Poor diets and tobacco both contribute to some of the major health disparities between rural and urban communities in the state,” says Dr. Kegler, “Tobacco contributes to all sorts of chronic diseases, and cancer is a big one. Trying to keep people from using tobacco and reducing exposure to tobacco has some influence on cancer rates, which are often higher in rural communities than urban communities.”

In addition, obesity rates are also higher in rural communities, and can contribute to diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and exacerbate arthritis.

Rural residents face difficulties accessing healthcare due to longer distances and inadequate transportation. A possible solution is telehealth. For Dr. Kegler, incorporating AI into telehealth could potentially be a game-changer for rural residents facing significant barriers to healthcare.

“It'll probably be slower to roll out to rural communities unless there's a deep investment. But I do think it has a lot of potential for monitoring, self-management of disease, health education programs, triaging, and providing access to specialists,” she says.

Dr. Kegler is even considering incorporating AI into her research to decrease costs.

“Both of our interventions involve health coaches. It'd be neat if that could be an AI interaction, to train AI to deliver the intervention. It could take on some of those health coaching and personalizing aspects,” says Dr. Kegler.

However, her end goal is to potentially use AI to revolutionize data collection for her research projects, as the team is currently collecting data through surveys and samples.

“I've been interested in the idea of wearables. Having everyone wear Fitbits or smartwatches and then having that data automatically collected,” says Dr.Kegler.

For Dr.Kegler, prioritizing the healthcare of rural citizens is incredibly important, as they are often overlooked. Strengthening the infrastructure through technological advancements and healthcare access expansion has exciting potential to improve the lives of rural Georgians.