Role Of AI In Healthcare, TB Prevalence In Nigeria

The use of technology in health care has proven to increases care providers, the capabilities and to patients, access to improved quality of healthcare. During the GDD summit organized by BAO Systems, it occurred that some of the most beneficial countries include Nigeria.

The GDD Summit is an annual technology conference for global health and development implementers to collaborate and share best practices on how digital solutions improve impact.

Speaking at the summit, InStrat Global Health Solution (InStratGHS) CEO, Okey Okuzu, discussed the design, deployment, and impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool – EWORS for TB case finding in Nigeria.

“Our goal is to overcome barriers to healthcare delivery in low resource settings presented by infrastructural challenges,” he noted. “We achieve this by leveraging mobile health technologies that allow for smooth flow of information across the health system for more effective patient health management or policy decisions regardless of physical location.”

The EWORS system is designed to drive actionable AI for public health intervention by sieving through a large volume of data to enable specific geospatial identification of disease cases and also predict the possibility of an outbreak based on historical data and set algorithm threshold. This helps local surveillance personnel to make data-informed decisions to curb the spread of diseases. Field data, captured on android devices wirelessly transferred to a cloud server for storage and analysis.

“The EWORS engine conducts advanced analytics to detect unexpected elevations in indicator data and populates this information on real-time GIS heat maps, reports, and alert notifications,” he added.

The alert notifications are generated in form of emails/SMS and sent to designated individuals when data from local areas exceed set thresholds, indicating undetected community spread. Designated teams review alarms and mobilize to conduct mass screening outreach at Alarm locations.

Under a USAID-funded program led by the KNCV TB Foundation, and in partnership with Plus 91 PVT, InStrat GHS deployed its EWORS predictive engine to 14 Nigerian states as a solution to find undetected TB cases in the country. The Analyses of the data from program inception to date demonstrate that prioritization of case finding outreach efforts, based on hotspot analytics and alarms, increases the yield of those efforts.

“This strategy is crucial to finding missing TB cases and improving case-finding, especially in low resource settings,” he opined.

Instrat demonstrated the importance of the role of technological advancement in improving health care delivery with the use of EWORS in TB detection and plans to expand this predictive technology to all communicable and non-communicable diseases.

This year’s GDD summit was a curation of topics and sessions that prioritize demonstrable impact, innovation, and emerging technologies that are influencing digital development.