IGF 2023 DC-DigitalHealth Conversational AI in low income & resource settings

Conversational AI has emerged as a game-changing tool in healthcare, offering innovative solutions to some of the most pressing challenges faced by the industry. This session aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the applications, benefits, and future potential of Conversational AI in the health sector. Today's Consumers demand quick, easy, and convenient digital interactions, even regarding healthcare. Patients are better informed and use digital channels to access help and information. They want to manage their medical information and journey digitally and deserve a flawless experience during every interaction. By allowing patients to schedule appointments and make payments online, conversational AI technology helps healthcare providers keep up with patient expectations. Here we want to shed some light on the potential of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) in low-resource settings, especially in lower-middle-income countries, where access to quality healthcare services is limited. In many parts of the world, particularly in low-resource settings, there is a critical shortage of healthcare professionals and limited infrastructure. These challenges often result in inadequate healthcare access and compromised patient outcomes. However, Conversational AI presents an opportunity to overcome these barriers and deliver high-quality care even in resource-constrained environments. Conversational AI can also play its part in strengthening the primary healthcare setup. Primary healthcare is the first source of interaction for any patient; enabling AI tools there would help ease the process, and since most of these settings have a shortage of healthcare professionals, this will be a huge step in meeting the population's demand.

This will be a hybrid session; the session moderator will be present on-site, and rest of the speakers will be present online . Given the importance of providing healthcare in low resource settings, we hope to draw a good number of people in the roundtable session from the attendees onsite and discuss the opportunities in conversational AI and how the world can benefit from it. We hope to prepare a short paper post the session and circulate it .