Where a patient lives still shapes whether advanced hospital technology is within reach. That is the central finding of an analysis of national hospital data published on September 12 in Scientific Reports.
Researchers at Drexel University worked through adoption records for 6,166 hospitals from 2023, then matched them against CMS outcomes, CDC hospital-setting mortality figures and county data covering 3,143 areas. Just 65.8 percent of the population studied sat within a 30 minute drive of care at an AI-enabled facility.
That burden falls unevenly. Access to hospital AI produced a Gini coefficient of 0.740, and robotics reached 0.776, meaning distance to enabled hospitals clusters among a minority of residents. The count of AI-enabled hospitals climbed 56 percent between 2022 and 2024.
Clinical signals varied by tool type. Staff-scheduling AI tracked with 3.9 percent relative improvement in sepsis bundle completion. Routine-task automation tracked with 5.4 percent lower 30 day pneumonia mortality.
County-level mortality results proved fragile. A link between automation access and lower hospital-setting mortality survived the primary model but moved with estimator choice and adjustment for organizational capacity.
The authors present their figures as a benchmark for measuring inequality, not as causal proof, and argue that only longitudinal study can show whether wider deployment narrows or widens the gap.
