AI Could Cut Out-of-Pocket Health Costs, Says AHFID Chief

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help Nigerians spend less of their own money on healthcare by making services faster and easier to reach, according to Dr Kunle Kakanfo, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Africa Hub for Innovation and Development (AHFID).

 

Kakanfo spoke at a media conference organised by AHFID in Abuja ahead of the Artificial Intelligence in Health Summit, scheduled for Oct. 19 and Oct. 20.

 

"Access to healthcare is more important than the money that we spend in healthcare," he said.

 

According to Kakanfo, more than 70 per cent of Nigerians still pay for healthcare out of pocket, meaning about seven in every 10 people fund their care directly.

 

He said AI could help bring that spending down by automating the verification of health insurance claims. Faster processing, he explained, would allow Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) to recover payments sooner and, in turn, expand coverage and services.

 

At primary health care (PHC) centres, he said, AI-supported ambient documentation could raise the number of patients a doctor sees from about 40 to 60.

 

That extra capacity, Kakanfo said, could widen access to services that might otherwise push patients towards private facilities, where they would pay out of pocket.

 

Kakanfo said AI could also help address Nigeria's health workforce challenges. He noted that the World Health Organization still put the country at about 3.8 doctors per 1,000 people.

 

He cited a 15-year cohort study which, he said, showed that although medical schools continued to graduate doctors, many of them later left the country.

 

"Every claim that we have made and that is being made about AI has to also be measured not just on the basis of the hype of AI.

 

"It is to be on the basis of the fact, is it able to move our indices forward, and is it able to improve health outcomes for the people?"

 

The AHFID chief executive said doctors were already using AI, citing a study which indicated that more than 70 per cent of doctors used ChatGPT to support consultations.

 

He, however, stressed the need for governance, safety measures and human oversight, insisting that AI should augment healthcare workers rather than replace them.

 

"A tool that reads X-ray does not staff the hospital. A tool that reads X-ray still needs a human in the loop," Kakanfo said.

 

He urged government to streamline the production and development of AI tools and to keep patient safety at the centre of their design and deployment.

 

AI tools used on Nigerian patients, he said, must undergo evidence-based scrutiny, safety checks, validation and proper regulation before use.

 

 

Kakanfo said locally generated data was needed to train AI models that could respond more accurately to Nigeria's health needs.

 

To that end, he said, AHFID had begun collecting cough sounds in hospitals within the Federal Capital Territory to develop locally trained models for detecting tuberculosis.

 

He said a two-week call for entries had drawn more than 30 AI innovations, of which between 12 and 15 had been selected to showcase their solutions at the summit.

 

One of them, a locally trained cervical cancer screening tool, analyses images of a woman's cervix. Kakanfo said it reported an estimated 80 per cent accuracy, compared with 30 per cent for a trained clinician's eye.

 

The summit, he said, would bring innovation, regulation and governance together, with discussions on data sovereignty, procurement, validation, safety and locally developed AI models.

 

Dr Abiola Oshunniyi, Senior Technical Adviser to the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), said Nigeria needed to domesticate AI for healthcare rather than wait for other countries.

 

Oshunniyi said AI components should be built into the e-health Bill before the National Assembly, and that outcomes from the summit could feed into deliberations at the National Council on Health (NCH).

 

"How do we bring memos to the NCH as an output of this conference that can then become a national resolution and create a national roadmap?" he asked.

 

He added that Nigeria also needed pathways for government and partners to adopt and scale locally developed health technology solutions that met international standards.

 

Ms Liss Yori, Technology Law Counsel, AHFID/AI4SID, and Coordinator of the AI in Health Summit, said patient needs must remain central to the deployment of AI in healthcare.

 

Responsible use, Yori said, required protecting patients' data and guarding against AI applications that could misrepresent patients or give unsafe health information.

 

She said the summit would help drive conversations on the ethical use of AI and ensure that health applications were developed and deployed responsibly.

 

The summit will bring together stakeholders from health, technology, regulation, government, development and the private sector to discuss how AI can improve healthcare delivery in Nigeria.