What is the role of artificial intelligence in health informatics in Africa?

AI is being used in several health informatics applications in Africa, including AI-assisted interpretation of chest X-rays for tuberculosis diagnosis, predictive models for disease outbreaks, and natural language processing for extracting data from clinical notes. However, most of these applications are still in the research or pilot phase and have not been widely deployed at scale.

For South Sudan, the immediate priority should be strengthening the foundational health information systems — DHIS2, OpenMRS, IDSR — before investing in AI. AI requires high-quality, structured data to work effectively, and this data infrastructure does not yet exist at scale in South Sudan. Building the data foundation now will enable AI applications in the future.