Advancing Universal Health Coverage through Artificial Intelligence

In this perspective, Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health Emily Adrion explores how artificial intelligence-driven innovations can address gaps in care for patients with complex brain disorders and advance global progress toward universal health coverage.

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Universal health coverage (UHC) — ensuring universal access to quality healthcare services without financial hardship — is a goal that is easy to support in theory yet seems to remain stubbornly elusive in practice. Patients with complex chronic and multimorbid conditions face particular difficulties in accessing timely, quality and affordable health care services. Multimorbidity is extremely prevalent; as many as 37% of adults globally have more than one chronic condition, yet the unfortunate reality is that few health systems are equipped to provide the coordinated specialist diagnostic and treatment services required to support those with multiple complex chronic conditions. Even in well-funded health care systems, gaps persist, with many patients experiencing delayed or misdiagnosis, or receiving suboptimal and fragmented care or even treatment that should not be used in the case in question.

Complex brain disorders (CoBraD), which include neurocognitive conditions (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia), sleep disorders (e.g., parasomnia, sleep apnea) and seizure disorders (e.g. epilepsy), present particular challenges. In part because of the complex pathophysiology of these conditions and the specialised knowledge that is required for accurate diagnosis and personalised treatment, few patients with CoBraD globally receive the appropriate care.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been promoted as the key means of strengthening health systems and advancing progress toward UHC. AI provides an opportunity to incorporate specialist clinical knowledge, evidence-based guidelines and extensive real-world data to generate algorithmic tools to support diagnosis and treatment. In this way, AI-driven innovations can potentially improve health system equity and efficiency by supporting clinical care and medical decision-making in areas with reduced access to specialist services, such as rural and remote and/or lower-income regions.

AI holds enormous potential to improve care for patients with complex brain disorders and advance global progress toward universal health care.

—Emily Adrion, Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health 

AI-driven health care technologies come with important concerns – including bias, data security, regulation, safety and ethics. However, with careful attention to design, AI holds enormous potential to improve care for patients with complex brain disorders and advance global progress toward universal health care.

Since 2021, I’ve been working alongside Atlantic Fellows Elissaios Karageorgiou, Ophir Keret, and Konstantina Sykara — together with a wider multidisciplinary team of researchers, clinicians and engineers from across Europe — on a European Commission-funded project aimed at creating an AI-driven platform: the Multidisciplinary Expert System for the Assessment and Management of Complex Brain Disorders (MES-CoBraD). AI-enabled Expert Systems such as MES-CoBraD could potentially increase access to personalised medical recommendations that inform decision-making in various clinical settings. MES-CoBraD is designed to be an applied research and clinical care ecosystem, offering advanced analytic tools to enhance research and contribute to improvements in patient care and, hopefully, ultimately support the sustainability of health care systems.

Further work needs to be done to understand the equity, cost and access implications of emergent AI-driven technologies for health. Moreover, it will be critical for us all to work to facilitate open and equal access to AI technologies so they are available universally on the basis of need and ability to benefit (rather than the ability to pay). This challenge should not be underestimated. It will require extensive advocacy to harness AI’s potential in strengthening health systems and addressing global health (in)equity. From a technology development perspective, a key first step is to embed universal health care principles into the design of these systems. From their inception, we need to incorporate principles around co-design and place the end-users at the centre of the development process.

Universal health care has long been a driving force in my own work, and through MES-CoBraD I have had the opportunity to integrate this in a new way: ensuring that the advancement of UHC is a core consideration in the development of technological innovations.

This article was kindly republished with the permission of the author and the Atlantic Institute. Read the original at the link below.