Fair Safe Medical AI: A South Asia Case Study to Co-Develop Local Agency and Trust Leaving No One Behind

Faisal Sultan and Sara Khalid of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Pakistan will leverage the power of open-source AI Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract insights more quickly and easily from large volumes of clinical data to support medical decision-making and minimize health disparities in South Asia. Healthcare systems in South Asia have limited resources and the critical information required for decision-making is often buried in patient notes (such as family history, drug adverse events, and social, behavioral, and environmental determinants). Health disparities are also prevalent, particularly for women and children. They will leverage existing LLMs specifically designed for health data and use the SKMCH&RC database, which contains both free text and structured data for 250,000 patients, to ensure that key subjective information, such as family history, and electronic health records are included. They will validate their model using available data on COVID-19 infections in Pakistan and evaluate its performance in terms of accuracy and speed.