AI for Health Equity: Transforming Pandemic Preparedness in Uganda (HEAL)

Daudi Jjingo of the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda will leverage generative AI to develop an interactive conversation-based platform to communicate the national guidelines for pandemic preparedness in a native African language to health workers to improve pandemic management. The national guidelines, currently available as a lengthy PDF, will be translated into a local Bantu language, Luganda, to improve accessibility to non-English speaking users, and converted into a data format for Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4. The data will include locally-relevant, medically-curated, and pre-approved information for pandemic preparedness, including prevention, detection, and treatment strategies. They will also build a user-friendly, dynamic interface for health workers to interact with the AI model as needed and use the information to guide interventions. Their platform will be field-tested by a group of 60 health workers at 20 clinical sites.