October 01, 2025
Associate Professor Praveen Rao is sharing his expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve rural health care.
A Mizzou Engineering researcher is collaborating with partners across campus and at other universities to support health care practitioners and policy makers in devising and implementing data-driven decisions.
Mizzou researchers recently received nearly $4 million from the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) to develop a future-focused approach to address gaps in rural health care through the new Center for Telehealth Research and Policy.
Underpinning those efforts is the work of Praveen Rao, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an expert in scalable artificial intelligence (AI) systems, data science and health informatics.
Rao will develop and test a privacy-preserving federated learning methodology to securely learn from distributed data sources: Individual hospitals will each train AI models on their own data locally, which will then be combined by a central system in a secure manner and shared back with the hospitals. In this way, AI models can be trained without moving the actual data, allowing hospitals to work together while protecting patient privacy.
The models will be used to improve the Project ECHO (Extension for Community Health Outcomes) and create new knowledge for telehealth programs. He will also be involved in applying multimodal generative AI for analyzing telehealth data.
“Ultimately, this work will provide foundational evidence to inform sustainable telehealth policy, improve care delivery models, and advance health equity for rural populations in Missouri and beyond,” Rao said.