When it comes to health care, Silicon Valley likes to imagine artificial intelligence as the technology that will cure disease, out-think physicians, and eventually decide who gets treated – and how. That, arguably, is the glamorous end of the business.
The unglamorous end — patient scheduling, referrals, the mountain of documentation that keeps clinicians typing instead of treating — is the part that makes most eyes glaze over whenever any attempt is made to explain it.
However, the latter happens to be an area where a joint venture between Community Hospital Corporation (CHC) and Resilient Healthcare is placing its bet on the future of AI in health care.
The product is called RAIN, an AI-powered network built to let hospitals deliver and manage care beyond their own walls. It is the technical backbone of Resilient’s “management services organization” model, and its first application is deceptively modest: outpatient physical therapy, handled from referral through clinician matching, scheduling, and clinical notes.
The comparison to ride-hailing giant Uber – an oft-used business trope – is more than a marketing conceit, at least in this instance; it is something that’s baked into RAIN’s mechanics. A physician refers a patient — often someone who lives too far from the hospital, or lacks transportation, or is simply unable to make repeat trips after surgery.
RAIN’s tech then weighs geography, schedules, and provider credentials, then pings a pool of clinicians with the basics of the case, Airbnb-style, without revealing identifying details upfront.
“We send it out to a group of clinicians to say… are you interested?” Brian Doerr, CHC’s senior vice president of information technology and security and privacy officer, explained in an interview.
Clinicians who opt in are then vetted by an administrative team before care is provisioned — a deliberate choice, Doerr said, to keep “human in the loop” rather than let the algorithm make the final call.
In keeping with the gig-platform logic, the workforce economics echo that sector.
The network’s clinicians set their own volume, choosing how many patients to see in a given week much as an Uber driver toggles availability. The system currently handles about 4,000 visits a month, with patients typically seen two to three times weekly for a standard visit of 45 minutes to an hour.
None of this is cheap. Implementation for the clinical model runs upward of $100,000, according to Doerr, but the pricing is flexible. Hospitals also pay ongoing technology fees and, in some arrangements, a per-click charge. A management fee tied to profit-sharing kicks in only once a facility clears a margin threshold — a structure that aligns CHC’s incentives with the hospital’s, rather than guaranteeing revenue regardless of results.
The payoff, Doerr cautions, is not lower costs – at least not immediately, since a hospital still carries its building and overhead.
However, efficiencies eventually arrive via the volume an institution would otherwise lose to “outmigration,” meaning patients who drift to more convenient providers, or who simply stop following post-surgical care plans because getting to appointments is too hard. CHC’s internal surveys found more than 80% of patients responded favorably to receiving PT at home.
One of the ambient fears about AI is job destruction that costs the labor force many of its human workers. But the company that built RAIN insists it is not trying to replace clinicians, so much as to alleviate the mundanity of back-office functions that liberate them to do what they do best: save human lives.
Resilient Healthcare CEO Dr. Jackleen Samuel, a practicing physical therapist, has said she returned to treating patients herself to see firsthand where their time was actually going — and built RAIN to cut the after-hours documentation eating into it.
Doerr, however, framed the philosophy more bluntly: “The best technology is a technology you never see.” The goal, as he described it, is to keep a screen from coming between a physician and a patient at the bedside, not to insert one.
That framing matters, because it cuts against both the hype and the dread that dominate public conversation about AI in general, and medicine in particular.
This is not the frontier work of diagnosing disease or accelerating drug discovery. It is AI doing the dull, necessary labor of medical coding, billing, and patient-tracking — freeing clinical staff to do the parts of the job that actually require a human being, and at which they most excel.
The data backs up the scale of the problem RAIN is chasing.
A 2025 McKinsey study found that roughly half of surveyed healthcare leaders had already deployed generative AI, with more than 80% rolling out at least one live use case. The firm estimates the technology could generate $60 billion to $110 billion in annual value for the American healthcare industry, with the largest gains in supply chain and back-office operations, rather than the exam room.
Separately, Philips’ 2025 Future Health Index, drawing on nearly 2,000 healthcare professionals, found more than three-quarters had lost clinical time to incomplete or inaccessible patient data — an average of 23 full working days a year per clinician. Nearly half of respondents said failing to adopt AI would worsen burnout from non-clinical tasks or delay early diagnosis and intervention.
For CHC, which also works with rural and community hospitals, the stakes are less about cutting-edge innovation than about triage. Although poised to get a fresh infusion of federal funding, Texas’ rural hospitals have struggled to meet the growing needs of the communities they serve.
As Doerr put it, in rural settings AI is often deployed simply “to fill gaps where we can’t find the expertise we need” — automating eligibility checks and pre-authorization tasks that would otherwise consume scarce staff hours. It is not a solution to the projected shortfall of 11 million health workers worldwide by 2030.
But it is, at minimum, a way to keep smaller hospitals in the game a little longer – one PT referral at a time.
Javier E. David is a veteran business journalist who has covered markets, finance and the global economy for over 20 years. His past stints include Reuters, CNBC, Yahoo Finance and The Wall Street Journal. He currently resides in Dallas. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/javieredavid/