Extracts below. Read online: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/gates-and-openai-team-up-to-pilot-ai-sol...
'The Gates Foundation and OpenAI announced a $50 million “pilot” on Wednesday to “advance AI capabilities for health” in Africa. Horizon 1000 promises “funding, technology, and technical support” to roll out AI solutions to 1,000 African primary healthcare clinics by 2028...
'One of Rwanda’s aims is to use AI to create “decision-support tools” for its 60,000-plus community health workers (CHW) who provide primary healthcare to communities across the country...
'As around 70% of the cases CHW deal with every year are malaria, the country wants an AI tool to help them to improve diagnosis and to better anticipate when and where to expect malaria cases, said Ingabire...'
Another article gives more detail on how AI would be used:
'Horizon1000's core mission is to utilise AI to support, not replace, frontline health workers in low-resource settings. The technology will be adapted to assist with key clinical and administrative functions, including symptom evaluation, clinical decision support, record-keeping, and automated documentation and disease surveillance analytics. By automating routine tasks and offering informed guidance, the project aims to reduce the burden on overstretched clinicians, allowing for faster and better-informed patient care.'
https://www.distilledpost.com/post/bill-gates-and-openai-back-50-million...
COMMENT (NPW): As a first step, I think it is important to start where the health workers are and understand their information needs rather than impose a technical fix. Horizon1000 appears to offer a panoply of solutions. However, for me it makes more sense to evaluate each component solution through rigorous research. For example, research projects are needed to identify how best to introduce AI to support clinical decision-making among community health workers.
It would also be very helpful if the Gates Foundation and/or Open AI would commit to the goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information, as described in the 2006 paper 'The 15th global challenge'. A modest amount of funding would support HIFA and WHO to implement our HIFA-WHO Collaboration Plan. Indeed, the first activity in the plan costs only $10k. We are meeting with WHO this week to plan next steps.
https://www.hifa.org/projects/hifa-official-relations-who
'In 2006 (when HIFA was launched) global health leaders wrote: ‘The Gates Foundation identified fourteen challenges but a fifteenth challenge stares us plainly in the face: The 15th challenge is to ensure that everyone in the world can have access to clean, clear, knowledge — a basic human right, and a public health need as important as access to clean, clear, water, and much more easily achievable.’ Their call was unheard and to this day no funding agency explicitly supports universal access.'
https://www.hifa.org/sites/default/files/other_publications_uploads/HIFA...
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org