Africa seeks AI, digital health boost – Chinadaily.com.cn
Africa seeks AI, digital health boost
African countries are seeking to harness artificial intelligence and digital health technologies to detect disease threats earlier, predict where outbreaks could emerge and speed up emergency responses, as governments push to build stronger, more connected health systems, African health experts and policymakers said.
“Digital transformation is no longer simply an IT agenda. It is a health security infrastructure,” said Vasilis Koulolias, special adviser to the director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on digital health, artificial intelligence and innovation.
He said digitally connected systems could allow an alert detected by a community health worker to move rapidly through health facilities and government systems, enabling decision-makers to see where cases, contacts, commodities and health workers are located.
AI could take health systems beyond recording what has already happened to helping authorities anticipate what could happen next, he said.
“The real question is, how quickly can a signal become a decision, and a decision become an action?” Koulolias asked.
He said the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo highlights the importance of rapid detection and response, warning that fragmented information systems can slow the movement of alerts, laboratory results and contact-tracing information, as well as the coordination of logistics.
He urged African countries to build digital health infrastructure before emergencies occur, including reliable electricity and connectivity, interoperable systems, cybersecurity measures, secure national data hosting and a skilled digital workforce.
“The systems that work every day are the systems more likely to work on day zero during the emergency,” he said.
In Kenya, the Ministry of Health is planning to integrate AI into the country’s national healthcare program to strengthen monitoring of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health
Koulolias said such digitalization of primary healthcare is critical because health security begins at the household, village and primary-care levels, where early signals of an outbreak may first emerge.
“A digitally enabled community health worker becomes more than a detector. He or she becomes the front line in the national health intelligence system,” he said.
In Ethiopia, researchers have developed AI tools to assist with breast-cancer screening, tuberculosis detection, brain tumor detection and systems for interpreting electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram readings.
According to Messay Tesfaye Demissie, a pediatric dermatologist at Addis Ababa University, AI-based screening could help address specialist shortages. She noted that Ethiopia has fewer than 10 mammography radiologists.
“If we could make it a nationwide screening, it’s not really doable by the number of mammography radiologists we have,” she said, explaining that an AI tool had been developed to screen mammographic images.
In Kenya, the Digital Health Agency is working toward an integrated health information system. Jean Kyula, chairperson of the Digital Health Committee at the Kenya Healthcare Federation, said the country’s Digital Health Superhighway — a national digital framework — is intended to connect healthcare players and enable shared health records.
She said the system is designed to help ensure that a patient traveling from a remote county to a referral hospital does not have to repeat medical investigations simply because medical records are not available electronically.
Kyula also warned that Africa’s AI ambitions will depend on whether countries can generate and govern their own health data.
Biruk Nikodimos, director of ICT and digital health at Washington Medical Center in Ethiopia, echoed the view, noting that many AI systems are trained on data that do not adequately represent African populations.
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