Artificial Intelligence is no longer bound to science fiction as it is developing and becoming more commonplace in our daily lives. In a modern evolving world, artificial intelligence is having ever wider uses. Reality is that those smart lines of code that rely on a continuous flow of data to improve performance are becoming amazing supporting tools to increase productivity and create new opportunities as witnessed before in earlier industrial revolutions.
1. With the wide range of uses of AI, how is AI being used in the healthcare
industry?
Africa deserves higher quality healthcare at a lower cost. Altibbi combined with the power of modern tools such as Artificial Intelligence will provide a more personalized and affordable care at a faster pace with lower chances of error. AI is here to disrupt the healthcare industry as we know it and altibbi is delivering that for Africa due to the wealth of data in this specific vertical and the magnitude of improvement to human life that can be achieved by making sense of all of this data. One of the many examples on how AI is changing the industry is through disease diagnosis such as detecting lung cancer based on patterns identified in CT scans.
2. AI is promising a whole new world, but how is Altibbi capitalizing on
that in its telehealth offerings?
Both AI and telehealth are aimed at cutting costs and diagnosing illnesses faster and more accurately. Therefore, Altibbi is developing AI-driven technology for healthcare professionals and consumers. Our medical chatbot has been already working on learning from the experiences of all doctors from the data sets we have and and is continuously doing this every day. We have witnessed huge growth in the number of consultations, due to the introduction of our sponsored consultation model in Egypt, with 1 million consultations underway, that relieves patients totally from the burden of paying for their initial consultation. This has meant that we had
a major influx in the amount of data based on which we improve our doctors diagnosis, decision making and any potential for errors.
We also launched the first smart Arabic symptom checker with 500 symptoms and 2500 questions gathered by 1000 doctors! Our checker asks the patient questions related to their symptoms, prior to connecting them with a doctor. This allows doctors to have more information regarding the case at hand, resulting in more efficient alerts regarding cases in general, but in particular ER related ones.
3. What plans does Altibbi have to include AI into your telehealth
offerings?
Altibbi is employing Machine Learning to leverage its ever-growing data sets as training data that improves the life of altibbi’s patients. We are working on ways to predict and alert regarding trending illnesses and symptoms large populations. We are also employing this data for medical research purposes.
4. Do you think people would be interested in telehealth in Egypt and
Africa in general? Telehealth is growing worldwide and it is growing at much higher rates in Africa, led by growth in Egypt and other countries that benefit from the advantage it has in serving remote areas, reducing costs and breaking the pain points of taboos and cultural barriers. Altibbi’s focus of ease of access and quality makes the value proposition of telehealth very obvious for the community in general and also in particular to the regions with difficulty accessing healthcare services, cases of chronic disease, on the very frequent and usually more educational mother and mother-to-be journey as well as the very popular category of reproductive health questions that is driven by the private nature of telehealth consultations. Altibbi recently launched the “One Million Free Medical Consultations initiative” in Egypt. It is the world’s largest free, telehealth initiative and it is delivered via voice calls and text under the umbrella of the Egyptian NGO T20 and sponsored by Telecom Egypt. The initiative is booming in particular in the Upper Egypt where the population has demonstrated that telehealth is the right fit for their needs.