AI Healthcare Operations in Africa: A Research Vision
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Abstract
Health African health systems are navigating a dual burden of infectious and non-communicable diseases under conditions of scarce resources, fragile supply chains, and workforce shortages. While digital health tools such as mHealth and EMRs have made inroads, systemic fragmentation, language inequities, and operational inefficiencies persist. Advances in Generative AI, Agentic LLMs, and multimodal intelligence now present an unprecedented opportunity to re-architect healthcare delivery across the continent. This work introduces ALRA-Health, a reference architecture for trustworthy, agentic LLMs designed to operate under low-resource African constraints. The framework integrates multilingual stacks for underrepresented African languages, OPS-HEALTH-AFRICA operational benchmarks, and privacy-by-design governance models, ensuring safe, contextually aligned deployment. Beyond clinical reasoning, we address logistics optimization, vaccine cold-chain resilience, referral triage, and claims automation, reframing AI adoption as both a technical and economic innovation.
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