Experts push trusted, homegrown AI for healthcare
AI in healthcare requires trust, local solutions — Experts
Experts have called for the development of trusted, homegrown and human-centred Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address healthcare challenges in Nigeria.
The call was made at a pre-summit webinar on AI in health organised by the Africa Hub for Innovation and Development (AFHID).
The experts stressed the need for AI health solutions that protect privacy, reflect local languages and realities, and maintain human involvement in critical healthcare decisions.
They also identified misinformation, poor design, weak institutional validation, fragmented health identifiers and inadequate infrastructure as barriers to scaling AI in Nigeria’s health sector.
The Chief Executive Officer of Advantage Health Africa (Aha), Abimbola Adebakin, said trust was particularly important in healthcare because it was a “low-forgiveness sector.”
She explained that Aha’s ‘myMedicines’ platform used familiar channels such as WhatsApp to gradually introduce users to AI-enabled services.
Adebakin said AI was already supporting healthcare activities such as drug interaction checks, information on side effects and medicine storage, as well as pharmacy demand forecasting and inventory management.
Dr Chinonso Egemba, Co-founder of AwaDoc, warned that AI-powered deepfakes could increasingly be used to spread false health information.
He called for greater public access to verified health information, saying people needed exposure to authentic information to better recognise misinformation.
Egemba also advocated a “human-in-the-loop” approach, where AI could provide health information at scale while human experts remained available for specialised support.
Dr Kieva Chris-Amusan, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Fertitude, said women would be more willing to adopt AI-powered health solutions when they were safe, private, accurate and capable of solving genuine problems.
She stressed the need for Nigerian AI health systems to reflect local languages, accents, images and cultural contexts, particularly those of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo users.
The experts also called for stronger data protection rules, government-backed health innovation programmes and a unified health identifier to improve service delivery.
They said stronger collaboration between government, innovators and healthcare institutions would be necessary to ensure AI improves health outcomes without eliminating the human element of healthcare.
