Experts Discuss AI Governance Toolkit for Health

Researchers are developing a toolkit to guide innovators, policymakers and regulators on what they should pay attention to as they integrate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Uganda’s healthcare system to guarantee safe use. 

Sharifah Sekalala, a Professor of Global Health Law at the University of Warwick, says they resolved to develop this toolkit, which will be open access for innovators, providing locally relevant pointers on what they need for both regulation and governance of new health technologies.    

Sekalala who is also the Principal Investigator on a Project called, ‘There is no app for this’ focused on regulating the migration of digital health data in Sub Saharan Africa said studies they have conducted over the last five years have revealed there are a lot of AI pilots in Uganda but innovators are working in silos without proper guidance on how to translate their digital health apps into useable products even as the need is huge.  She worries that with the speed at which technology is moving, no single institution can regulate it alone. 

Sekalala speaking shortly after Dr Ayub Twaha, the Vice Chairperson of the Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners Council (UMDPC), revealed at the meeting attended by experts and regulators from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania that over three-quarters of the medical personnel in Uganda are ignorant about artificial intelligence and yet in many disciplines of medicine, the technologies are already being used unregulated.

He cites dentistry where AI is already being used in doing dental X-rays and is helping them make health decisions more quickly and accurately.  

Experts at the meeting, however, worried that while it’s no secret that AI is being used, there is no dedicated law comprehensively guiding what’s happening; even students in medical schools are deploying AI in their research, and yet it’s still unclear what impact this creates.

Responding to this, Ayub said the council is developing a guideline to assist them in monitoring the use of this new tech in medicine and that as they inspect medical schools, they are also checking how those that are incorporating AI in their curriculum are implementing it.

Commenting about the concerns raised in the meeting, Ambrose Ruyooka, who heads Uganda’s National Taskforce for AI within the Ministry of ICT, acknowledged that there is no fully -fledged legal and regulatory framework in the country in the form of an Act but said its absence doesn’t mean AI should not be used. He says the toolkit being prepared will, in the meantime, guide them on how to safely deploy such new tech in the health sector.

Adding that incorporating AI in health and education is a key priority for government, Ruyooka said that in healthcare specifically, they are emphasizing validation by human beings; for instance, if it’s used in diagnosis in the labs, they insist that results must be verified by human beings. For him, while a dedicated law is important, the government is not yet decided on whether they need a policy or a fully-fledged regulatory framework.

For now, he says, the government is developing a strategy to guide them because they need to first understand what AI is exactly and what areas they can actually regulate before developing a law.