According to stakeholders, health literacy is a strong determinant of wellness among vulnerable populations, and AI-driven chat bots are designed to enable more patients to get the care they need.

With the right infrastructure, says the report, along with effective partnerships and clinician and patient buy-in, AI can help prevent disease, diagnose patients more accurately and tailor treatment plans to individual patients.

Currently, say programmers, deploying a one-off clinical AI application is a manual, disjointed process, so clinicians are looking for a solution that can seamlessly integrate AI algorithms directly into their existing workflows.

The new system, say stakeholders, will enable algorithms to travel from one hospital to another to train on local datasets, then provide each hospital a blockchain-distributed ledger that captures and traces all data used for model training.

Increasingly, health plans and tech firms are teaming up to use digital and AI strategies to tackle mental health issues.

While there is skepticism about the value of introducing AI in low-and-middle income countries, given the widespread need for basic infrastructure, the long-term advantages make overcoming present challenges a worthy goal.

While AI developments in healthcare run a wide gamut, the sophisticated techniques being applied to cognitive computing, among other things, could be transformative.

According to the company, East Africa has some of the highest connectivity rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing significant opportunities for AI to be used to help improve access to medical advice for patients and clinicians. 

If AI projects are going to succeed, says one stakeholder, patients must be encouraged to share their health information while being thoroughly educated about the benefits of doing so.