In Asia, millions of people struggle to access healthcare due to limited infrastructure, high costs, and shortages of trained professionals. Rural clinics operate with fewer resources while urban hospitals are understaffed and manage high patient volumes.
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) offers an opportunity to address these gaps and improve healthcare equity in Asia. To achieve this, healthcare professionals must upskill in AI to not only learn new skills and stay ahead of industry trends, but to deliver better patient outcomes.
AVPN’s AI Opportunity Fund: Asia-Pacific, supported by Google.org and the Asian Development Bank, held a focus group discussion with local training providers in India and Vietnam. The discussion highlighted how targeted AI skilling for frontline workers provides a direct path to improving healthcare access for remote and communities with unmet needs.
AI at the heart of healthcare
For doctors and physicians, AI has become a practical tool to enhance efficiency. Dr. Saurabh Tiwari, a surgical oncologist at Max Hospital India, saw AI’s potential when it quickly generated patient discharge medical summaries. After completing AI training from DataLEADS, he found it easier to prepare notes, organise ward rounds, and provide advice to patients. This has given him more confidence in his daily practice.
At a deeper level, building strong AI fundamentals also helps doctors operate AI-embedded healthcare equipment like CT scans and MRI machines. Dinh Nguyen of Doccen highlighted that these technologies can reduce the chance of missed diagnoses and flag subtle indicators that might not be visible to the human eye.
AI is also transforming healthcare in rural areas. Lalitha M, a village health nurse, began using AI more carefully after completing training from Sambhav Foundation. She now uses AI to supplement her knowledge and enhance her expertise, scanning the prescriptions with an AI tool to help explain symptoms and treatments to patients in detail.
The impact of AI upskilling is clear: It is augmenting the capabilities of healthcare professionals to deliver care more efficiently and at scale, while helping to expand equitable healthcare access for communities.
Improving Healthcare with AI
In India, accredited social health activists (ASHA) and nurses in remote areas are often the first point of contact that links communities to the public health system.
In linguistically diverse areas, prescriptions are often written in English or in medical shorthand that’s hard to understand. Through training under the Sambhav Foundation, ASHA workers and nurses learned to use AI to translate prescriptions into local languages. This helps patients better understand their medication and treatment plans and follow them correctly.
With AI upskilling, frontline workers can provide culturally appropriate information, explaining symptoms, treatment options, and when professional care is needed in the local language. This support is especially important in rural communities, where low awareness of disease prevention has led to widespread self-medication.
Upskilled healthcare workers can also better manage data in remote areas. AI training gives them the ability to digitise records, organise them into a cohesive dataset, and store them in a centralised system for easy access.
These aggregated digital records can help identify health patterns and trends, such as certain illnesses or gaps in vaccination coverage. These insights can then be used to design targeted interventions and evidence-based policymaking.
Driving AI adoption
Training providers stressed that integrating AI into healthcare systems will require collaboration between the government, hospitals, and medical equipment manufacturers.
They recommended AI upskilling should be included as a core competency within the curricula, particularly in subjects such as preventive medicine to institutionalise it. To further build momentum, they said the government should establish centres of excellence, starting with pilot centres in hospitals and colleges to provide capacity building and act as a sustainable resource for the community.
Mir Sajad of the Sambhav Foundation suggested that to convince regulatory bodies of AI’s value, organisations must back their proposals with data, best practices, evaluations and key performance indicators. When regulators see AI’s potential clearly, they are more likely to endorse its adoption. This would expedite AI upskilling and make healthcare more accessible.
The AVPN AI Opportunity Fund: Asia-Pacific is supporting AI upskilling to increase the literacy and comfort of healthcare workers when using new technology. By funding providers who have the local expertise on ground, the Fund ensures that grassroots training is tailored, contextualised, and grounded in the realities of communities with unmet needs.
