Bill Gates and OpenAI back $50mn AI rollout in African health clinics

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The Gates Foundation and OpenAI plan to invest $50mn to use AI to ease the impact of chronic staff shortages in 1,000 primary health clinics and surrounding communities in Rwanda and other African countries by 2028.

The technology could be a “game-changer in expanding access to quality care” in poorer nations, Bill Gates said, as he unveiled the initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.

“We aim to accelerate the adoption of AI tools across primary care clinics, within communities and in people’s homes,” said the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.

Health has become a leading focus of tech groups’ efforts to expand the use of AI tools, developing products that aim to reduce doctors’ workloads and speed up treatment.

Many hospitals and doctors globally are using large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT, as well as AI medical note-taking apps to auto-generate transcripts of patient visits, highlight medically relevant details and create clinical summaries.

Gates stressed that the initiative with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, known as Horizon1000, was to “support health workers, not replace them”.

Estimated shortages of almost 6mn health workers in sub-Saharan African countries put staff in an “impossible situation”, Gates wrote in a blog. They were “forced to triage too many patients with too little administrative support, modern technology and up-to-date clinical guidance,” he said.

The initiative aimed to help with clinical record-keeping and symptom evaluations to make health workers more productive — “that is, to see patients more efficiently and to make better decisions”, Gates said in an interview with the FT at Davos.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said: “AI is going to be a scientific marvel no matter what, but for it to be a societal marvel, we’ve got to figure out ways that we use this incredible technology to improve people’s lives.”

Low-quality care contributed to between 5.7mn and 8.4mn deaths annually in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

However, the rise in the use of AI tools by doctors has spurred criticism from researchers about the dangers of AI-generated fabrications, known as “hallucinations”, which could be particularly harmful in a medical context, as well as the question of patient data privacy.

A growing body of research has also shown that these tools could lead to worse health outcomes for historically understudied groups such as women and ethnic minorities, since there may be inadequate data on diseases that threaten them disproportionately.

Language may be a further challenge in a continent as linguistically diverse as Africa, since the most abundant health data and AI models use English.

A study last year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the way a health question is written can make a big difference to the response provided by the AI model.

Patients whose messages contained typos, informal language or uncertain phrasing were between 7 and 9 per cent more likely to be advised against seeking medical care by AI models than those with perfectly formatted communications, even when the clinical content was the same.

Researchers have warned that this could result in people who do not speak English as a first language or are not comfortable using technology being unfairly treated.

The Gates Foundation said it will monitor, measure and audit the performance of the AI models for safety problems, such as inaccuracies and biases. It also intends to roll out the features gradually and tailor the tools for local cultures and contexts.

Rwanda last year announced plans for a health intelligence centre to harness AI to analyse data, including down to the village level. 

For a more in depth discussion on the Gates Foundation’s most recent initiative, as well the role of philanthropy more generally under President Trump, listen to next week’s episode of The Rachman Review, the FT’s weekly foreign affairs show, on FT.com and in the FT app, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.