AI in healthcare is brave, but proceed with extreme caution initially.

AI-Powered Primary Care in India: Challenges and Future Prospects

• The possibility of a “free AI powered primary-care physician for every Indian, available 24/7” within the next five years raises questions about feasibility, sustainability, and India’s readiness to tackle such undertakings.
• Primary health care (PHC) ensures the right to the highest attainable level of health by bringing integrated services closer to communities.
• AI excels in processing and automating repetitive tasks but lacks characteristics of human intelligence such as understanding the physical world, retrieving complex information, maintaining persistent memory, and engaging in reasoning and planning.
• AI cannot replicate the moral and ethical reasoning that comes from conscious experience.
• Health-care data is scattered, incomplete, and often inaccessible for AI training, making it difficult to train a model.
• The need for extensive data collection to improve accuracy is at odds with privacy and ethical concerns.
• The costs involved in establishing infrastructure to capture, collect, and train this data are substantial.
• The diversity of India complicates the issue further, requiring data for AI models to be extensive and deeply contextualised.
• AI can play a crucial role in specific, well-defined tasks within health care, particularly through narrow intelligence, diffusion models, and transformers.
• The “black box” problem, where the decisionmaking processes of AI algorithms are not transparent or easily understood, poses risks in health care.
• Google DeepMind’s AI mysterious algorithm defeating world-class players in the GO game raises concerns in real-life health-care decisions.
• India and the issue of AI governance: A recent petition in the Kenyan Parliament highlights the ethical complexities in AI development, revealing the exploitation of underpaid workers in training AI models.
• AI tools in health care must be developed and deployed with the core medical ethics of “Do No Harm”.