Experts in healthcare and technology have called for the development of trusted, homegrown and human-centred Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to address healthcare challenges in Nigeria.
They made the call during a pre-summit webinar on AI in health organised by the Africa Hub for Innovation and Development (AFHID), where participants examined the opportunities and challenges of deploying emerging technologies across the health sector.
Chief Executive Officer of Advantage Health Africa (AHA), Abimbola Adebakin, said trust was critical to the adoption of AI in healthcare because health was a “low-forgiveness sector”.
She said AHA had developed its ‘myMedicines’ platform around familiar channels such as WhatsApp, enabling users to interact with a system they already understood before introducing AI into the process.
“Trust comes when people know to an extent who is behind the device,” she said.
Adebakin said the organisation had also automated order processing and customer engagement on its website because it was a familiar channel for its users.
She warned that a single confusing AI response could undermine trust, making it important for innovators to introduce systems gradually and ensure their operations were understandable and reversible.
According to her, AI was increasingly being applied beyond last-mile healthcare delivery, including helping patients understand drug interactions, possible side effects and proper medicine storage.
She added that AI was also supporting pharmacy operations through demand forecasting and inventory control on the Advantage Platform.
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Dr Chinonso Egemba, Co-founder of AwaDoc and a public health communication strategist, raised concerns about the growing use of AI to create deepfakes and spread false health information.
He said advances in the technology could make manipulated content increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine information.
Egemba called for greater public exposure to verified health information, saying people could only identify false content when they had sufficient knowledge of authentic information.
“You cannot place the responsibility of identifying misinformation on the populace. The only way you can identify fake is if you have been exposed to the original,” he said.
He cited a KPMG and University of Melbourne study which found that 59 per cent of Nigerians surveyed identified the loss of human interaction as their top AI-related risk.
Egemba said the concern reinforced the need to maintain human involvement as AI expanded in healthcare.
He advocated a “human-in-the-loop” approach in which AI could provide health information at scale, while human experts remained available for specialised support.
He also urged health institutions to use trusted community structures and local languages to promote verified health information and counter misinformation.
Managing Director and Co-Founder of Fertitude, Dr Kieva Chris-Amusan, said women were more likely to adopt AI-powered health solutions when the technologies were safe, private, accurate and addressed genuine needs.
She said Fertitude anonymised users’ data by storing records under identification numbers rather than names or email addresses, while its privacy policy explained how information was handled.
Chris-Amusan said many large language models were trained predominantly on Western populations and might not adequately reflect the experiences of African women.
She called for Nigerian AI health solutions to incorporate local accents and languages, including Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, as well as images and contexts familiar to local users.
She identified appropriate user experience, accurate retention of patient history and product-led reminders as important factors in sustaining engagement with AI health platforms.
The panellists identified poor design thinking, inadequate institutional validation and fragmented identifiers as some of the barriers to scaling AI solutions in Nigeria’s health sector.
They called for clearer data protection rules and stronger institutional support for innovators, while encouraging stakeholders to share failures and lessons from AI projects to strengthen the wider health technology ecosystem.
They also advocated a single identifier for health services, citing the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system in the financial technology sector as an example of how a common identifier could improve service delivery.
The experts further called for government-led infrastructure and support mechanisms, including a health innovation accelerator modelled on initiatives such as the UK National Health Service (NHS) approach.
They said government was more open to innovation than many founders perceived, but innovators needed to demonstrate the value of their solutions and understand governance, infrastructure and literacy challenges at healthcare facility level.
The webinar formed part of activities leading to the main AI in Health Summit convened by AFHID, which is expected to further examine the role of AI and innovation in addressing healthcare challenges and improving health outcomes in Nigeria.
