The use of technology, such as the delivery of lifesaving medical products by drones, and leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), can revolutionise healthcare provision to people in need, according to the Minister of ICT and Innovation, Paula Ingabire.

Ingabire made the remarks on Thursday, January 17, during the "Fixing Healthcare, Digitally” panel at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

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Setting some context, Ingabire said a lot of the work that the country is doing in terms of achieving end-to-end digitisation of our healthcare ecosystem is largely built on the fact that Rwanda’s policy of inclusion ensures that every citizen in Rwanda has access to healthcare.

"And by doing that, we are a country that has achieved over 99 per cent healthcare insurance for all our citizens,” she said, adding that digitising the process of enabling residents to access some health services regardless of where they are was necessary.

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Ingabire underscored that when it comes to emerging technologies, it’s not a question of just deploying them; it’s figuring out what is the best technology, and where to address the problem, citing drone company Zipline.

She said Rwanda partnered with Zipline to address logical challenges, especially in the efficient supply of pharmaceuticals to the country’s remote, hard-to-reach areas.

"When we started to engage with Zipline, they had this proposal. We had close to 500 healthcare facilities, especially in rural parts of the country, where road access was still the challenge, and so being able to deliver the necessary medical products was a bit of a challenge,” she said.

For her, Zipline offered a better option compared to building new road networks and temperature-controlled facilities to ensure the safety of medical products at health facilities across the country.

When Zipline started working in Rwanda, there were no drone regulations or use policy in place, pointing out, "We call ourselves a hub, a proof of concept country because we wanted to test it and see what the gains are.”

But, Ingabire said results from the partnership are commendable so far.

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"With Zipline, we started with blood products, and now we are delivering a big range of medical products to these health facilities and we were able to, even in terms of impact, move from delivering these products in three and a half hours to as short as 23 minutes. And this is an on-demand service that we were able to provide,” she said.

Informed by the performance of Zipline, she said the country was able to develop a performance-based drone regulation policy based on use case—because it was solving an urgent problem, adding that some countries used them as a benchmark to create similar regulations for drone use cases.

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The case of AI in medical domain

Ingabire underscored the importance of AI use in healthcare for Rwanda as a country, citing, "We have about 13 radiologists for a population of 13.2 million people” [as per a census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda in 2022].

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"So, we are talking about one radiologist for one million people, and so, you can imagine the bulk of work. So, for us it was very clear that if we were able to build an AI model that these radiologists use to quickly analyse and figure out which cases are critical and bring them to the front and deal with them, it’s a better use case on how we apply AI,” she said.

"And so, because we’re looking at that particular use case, we’re then able to accelerate the development of data protection and privacy laws because that had to do with a lot of personal data that was going to be used as we do this kind of analysis,” she observed.