Monitoring and preparing for disease outbreaks should be the top consideration for AI developers in global health, the first-ever global priority-setting report has concluded.
The report, published in The Lancet, polled 51 experts across rich and poor countries, and queried three large language models. Those in low- and middle-income countries and experts in global health, along with two of three AI large-language models, all agreed.
However, experts in high-income countries felt the top priority should be affordable interventions to reduce the overall disease burden, and the outlier large-language model Gemini 2.5 Flash, thought predictive health should come top.
The difference between experts in high-income countries and those in low-income countries was quite stark. For experts in low- and middle-income countries, the top two priorities were dedicated to infectious diseases.
In contrast, high-income country experts only put infectious disease as a third priority, and instead gave more importance to health systems and the overall disease burden.
The report was produced through a collaboration between the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford in the UK, and Zhejiang University in China, with strong representation from experts in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) through the International Society of Global Health (ISoGH), and the newly established Bled Institute for Leadership in Digital Transformation and AI (BILDAI), Slovenia.
“This is the first global research priority-setting exercise focused specifically on data science and AI in global health,” said Igor Rudan, BILDAI non-executive director, in a LinkedIn post following publication of the paper.
“This paper is policy-relevant, particularly in informing future investments and strategies to ensure that digital health innovation in LMICs is equitable, feasible, and aligned with local delivery capacity,” he said.
“It also contributes to the evolving conversation on how to responsibly integrate generative AI into research governance.”
Top five priorities for AI development, according to experts in high-income countries (HIC), global institutions, and low-income countries.
Top four priorities for three leading large-language models.
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