Is Healthcare AI Innovation Failing to Reach the Patients Who Need It Most?

Healthcare experts attending the Summit highlighted the need to look beyond AI’s potential to accelerate drug development and improve diagnostics, and consider how it can help address longstanding barriers to equitable healthcare access. 

The article explores how pharmaceutical companies could make greater use of AI across the medicines value chain, including to address unmet needs among underserved populations, strengthen manufacturing and anticipate supply chain disruptions. It also highlights lessons from the implementation of AI-supported cervical cancer screening in Kenya and Tanzania, where infrastructure limitations, unreliable supplies and challenges with patient follow-up demonstrated the importance of adapting technologies to local healthcare contexts.  

Margo Warren, Director of Government Engagement and Policy at the Access to Medicine Foundation, is quoted highlighting the untapped potential of AI beyond drug development, with opportunities to strengthen manufacturing and anticipate disruptions in medicine supplies: "How can you use [AI] to better predict supply chain issues? How can you use this to make manufacturing stronger? There are other elements that can also be hugely impactful when it comes to practically ensuring that people have access to these new innovations."