There's a lot of hype about what generative AI and LLMs like ChatGPT will do to improve healthcare in Africa and around the world - but is it going to work? Today we sit down with the team running the largest study ever done on how LLMs will - and won't - work for healthcare in Africa. Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health, speaks with Bilal Mateen, Executive Director of Digital Square at PATH, to discuss the upcoming AfriMed-QA project which will evaluate 20 LLMs over 32 clinical specialties across 15 countries in Africa.
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This is Part 3 of 4 of our series on AI for Health. Shoutout to our sponsor, Reach Digital Health, for making this series possible.
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Show Notes
In this interview, we cover:
(4m02s) - Introducing Bilal Mateen and Tobi Olatunji
(9m20s) - The 4 ways generative AI will change healthcare in Africa
(17m01s) - The AfriMed-QA Project is creating a dataset of 20,000 medical questions and answers from 15 countries across Africa and 32 clinical specialties. In its second phase, the project will benchmark 20 of the leading large language models (LLMs) in the world to evaluate their effectiveness in the context of African healthcare.
(30m02s) - Takeaways for healthcare professionals and the global health community
(32m46s) - A call to action for donors
Note the content in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as investment, legal, business, tax, or medical advice. Nor should this information be used to evaluate any investment or security.
References
You can read the launch announcement of the AfriMed-QA project here. This project is supported by Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH. Additional AfriMed-QA implementing partners are listed below.
Masakhane, a grassroots, natural language processing community built for Africa by Africans.
Sisonke Biotik another grassroots community aimed at bridging the gap between healthcare practitioners and machine learning practitioners.
Bio-RAMP Labs is a global research community that Toby helped set up at the intersection of healthcare and artificial intelligence.
If you haven’t seen the ChatGPT-4o demo from May 13 2024, check it out here.
Bilal’s shoutout goes to Blue Marble, which is building a better kind of health insurance product to protect vulnerable women from the effects of climate change. You can read about this innovative product here.
How LLMs Will and Won't Work for Healthcare in Africa