AI Technologies can Improve Life Expectancy in Nigeria – USAID
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Nigeria Mission Director, Melissa Jones, says Nigeria can ensure improved life expectancy with effective adoption of AI within the healthcare setting.
She said its effective adoption to streamline processes within the healthcare setting, from medical records, data mining to understand trend of diseases, restoring individuals lost to care to an improved turnout time on vaccines and drug production, will see life expectancy grow.
Melissa Jones, who spoke during a panel discussion on “Health: Using AI for Healthcare Innovation” at a two-day Global Inclusivity and AI: Africa conference in Lagos, said that 25% of all the deaths in the world are related to infectious diseases but can be significantly reduced in Nigeria by the use of AI.
She stated AI is already transforming the healthcare sector, contributing to vaccine development.
“We’ve been working on things like HIV since 2003, with the launch of the PEPFAR initiative. We understand that tackling HIV and utilising AI can enhance the standard of care for patients while also identifying those who lack testing, bringing them into treatment, and guaranteeing their viral suppression.
The USAID Nigeria Mission Director declared that the effective adoption of AI to streamline processes within the healthcare setting can be transformative if it is done right, particularly with the private and public sectors involvement, and it is used as a tool in support of individuals’ health and individuals’ understanding of their own health outcomes.
Jones, however, stated that to improve inclusiveness, Nigeria should focus on health insurance, using population-based data, streamline the health sector through AI, stem medical tourism, and so on.
Read Also:
“Health insurance, using population-based data, you can cost it well using AI. You know the real-time cost of every single intervention, whether it’s HIV care, neonatal care, labour, or delivery. When you can cost health insurance and do it well, you’re able to have a huge impact on the quality and outcomes of health.
“Two, the Ministry of Health needs to stop hiring doctors and hire people who are in business because the reality of this is, as we look at what the AI is doing, we need very good people in finance. That is what this is about. Too many doctors are running the health sector.
“Three, what the private sector can do and what private providers should start doing is stop trying to deliver health services. What they should be doing is actually getting into the business of AI. A good example of all of this is the case of Thailand. Thailand started its journey to UHC in the 1970s. Look at their health outcomes today.
“Four, Nigeria’s in a big problem because the majority of their population is under the age of 24. The burden of health happens more in older populations. You are spending way too much money on healthcare, and you’re doing that because you’re inefficient. That is the reality.
“The market is going to drive this, and consumers will drive this process. A lot of people in Nigeria who have means go and seek services outside of this country. That is a problem. If you want to be able to do it well, you need to stay in Nigeria.
“Nigeria has the capacity; it has the technology; it has the talent. It has all of that to have a quality healthcare system. And let us be clear: COVID has told us a lot, but what it did tell us is that health is the foundation of everything.
“You cannot have an economy if you have a pandemic. And to be able to deliver quality healthcare relies on our ability to understand the analytics, and predictive analytics are already here in this country. The same way that we can predict climate, we can predict what’s happening to populations within health.”
