FIND statement at the side event on artificial intelligence and digital health during the 3rd G20 health working group meeting

Side event on artificial intelligence and digital health

Delivered by Marta Fernandez Suarez, FIND, Chief Technology Officer
4 June 2024, Salvador, Brazil

Thank you, Chair.

AI has the potential to revolutionize the delivery of diagnostic services worldwide. Dr Alain Labrique, highlighted the advancements made in diagnostic radiology to facilitate timely and reliable tuberculosis screening by healthcare workers. FIND has been supporting these efforts to foster the elimination of bias and to guarantee accuracy across populations and settings. In collaboration with WHO, we have developed a digital validation platform to evaluate and validate the performance of software on diverse and inclusive datasets to generate the evidence necessary for policy development by WHO.

Our experiences have demonstrated that any AI application must be fit-for-purpose, grounded in the context of country and real-world, user needs, and informed by representative, inclusive datasets. FIND urges the G20 to consider the following measures to ensure that the benefits of transformative technologies are reaped by all:

• Develop national data governance frameworks, along with the availability of high-quality datasets for priority health-related use-cases in LMICs,
• Address regulatory barriers by using evidence generation frameworks that can swiftly evaluate the performance of these technologies against clinical reference standards, especially at a local level and using local datasets,
• Support the development, evaluation and scale-up of multi-disease, decision support algorithms that can enable integrated screening and diagnostic services in communities, while preserving data privacy and governance
• Enable a ground-up, connected and interoperable diagnostic data ecosystem for effective surveillance, outbreak prediction and response.

Thank you