A hospital in the cloud bringing health care anywhere in the world | Mohamed Aburawi

0:03This is TED Health, a podcast from the TED Audio Collective, and I'm your host Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. Imagine you're sick and need a doctor, but there isn't one nearby. What if your only option was traveling for hours or relying on a pile of incomplete handwritten records? For millions of people, that's not just an inconvenience. It's a crisis. Surgeon and health systems entrepreneur Mohamed Aburawi has a bold idea. A hospital in the cloud. He's using AI to connect patients in remote and conflict-affected areas with doctors who actually understand their language, their culture, and their medical needs.

0:44But this isn't just about healthcare and far-off places. It's about all of us. As AI shapes the future of medicine, whose data is actually being used to build it? And what happens when entire communities are left out? From faster care to fairer AI, this talk will change the way you think about the future of medicine for us all. But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

1:18And now, 2024 TED Fellow Mohamed Aburawi. This is a picture from the Libyan-Tunisian borders. These are patients who couldn't find care within their own country. These ambulance cars carried my father, my grandma, before she passed away. And for me, this is emblematic of the challenge we're currently facing. We see a significant number of patients seeking care beyond their borders, and they should get care within their community. Currently, it's very difficult to do that just by training more doctors and building more medical schools or hospitals because we will never be able to reach everyone everywhere.

2:04But if there was an AI doctor that can be with them and have the answers whenever they need them and where they need them and having those answers being contextualized for that specific patient in that village, we would not see such dire consequences of years of underinvestment in health. I'm Mohamed Abrawi, a surgeon, and I have the privilege of leading our team at Spitar, a digital health platform that connects patients in remote communities across the Middle East and Africa to physicians that understand their context language and are able to help them best. It's basically a hospital in the cloud.

2:50This folder is how health records are kept in Libya. This file can hold so much in terms of documentation. And even then, it's very rare that you'll find a patient that will come to you with a file that has everything from their past history that they've kept perfectly neat together for you just to kind of go through. As opposed to when I was working, for example, in one of the leading institutions in the U.S., I can just ask for patient's name, date of birth, log in, get every single procedure that performed in the past 15 years. Because of the lack of digitization in these areas where we have ongoing volatility, a patient may be in one village today, tomorrow you will have conflict and they're in another one.

3:34and people don't really leave or migrate with their files in their packpacks. Like, oh, my health records. So you lose that. And you lose every single allergy, procedure, medical problem, medication that they've had. And you're constantly building that record from scratch. So essentially what we do is help patients capture their medical histories in a digital format. And then we make sure that that record is available at their fingertips, in their phones, but also available for the doctors. And we continue to build on that record to make sure that patients get the best care possible whenever they need it.

4:15And that's kind of the capturing side of things, the capturing the data. And from there, we start to work on cleaning that data up and making sure it's consistent. And it could be fed into models that could later on start to kind of give these predictive analytics. But what we see with AI or this data economy in general is unfortunately a similar trend we've seen in the past with colonial powers, where now data is the new oil. There is a movement to capture as much data as possible and for this data to be fed into the AI models that are currently being developed. and it's being fed the data that exists in mostly the Western world, where it's readily accessible, where you have electronic medical records.

5:03But when you look at certain villages in Libya or other countries which are suffering now, going through conflict, or have been historically kind of marginalized and underserved, there is not that attention to collecting data. We are not including the full spectrum of humanity. As we continue to build AI, we need to involve other countries in that data collection process and not just assume that we can build a technology in the West and just parachute in. And because it's a medical AI, it will work perfectly there. It will not work. I hope it's a future where patients do not have to leave their countries or wait for months, sometimes even years, to get the proper care that they need.

5:50The writer William Gibson once said, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. AI has the power to really make sure that quality of care is evenly distributed to everyone everywhere.

6:12That was 2024 TED Fellow Mohamed Aburawi. And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by me, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah DeGrange, Daniela Balareso, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarnivong, and Roxanne Heilash. If you enjoyed today's episode, rate and review the show on your favorite platform. It helps other people to find us. and I'd really love to hear your feedback. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshannaMD.