Artificial intelligence is transforming healthcare-improving diagnostics, accelerating drug development, and reducing administrative burdens on clinicians.
Finland uses AI to train health workers. Estonia applies it to medical data analysis. Spain deploys it for disease detection. In Rwanda, the Gates Foundation and OpenAI launched a $50 million initiative to equip 1,000 primary clinics with AI health tools by 2028.
WHO Regional Director Hans Kluge warns that without clear strategies, data privacy safeguards, legal guardrails, and AI literacy investment, AI risks deepening global health inequities-not reducing them.
AI scribe tools now free doctors from paperwork. Emerging diagnostic models predict over 1,000 conditions more than a decade in advance. Yet language models remain unreliable for urgent medical triage-and biological data access lacks enforceable governance.
Only 8% of WHO member states have a national health-specific AI strategy. The core question is no longer what AI can do-but who decides how, and for whom.
Experts will confront these challenges at the Euronews Health Summit in Brussels on 17 March.