By Team, GNA
Ho (V/R), Aug. 6, GNA – Professor Stephen Moore of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cape Coast (UCC), has advocated for duty-bearers to strengthen governance, invest in local innovation and adopt evidence-based approaches to harness the full potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in transforming healthcare delivery.
Speaking at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Pharma (ICAIH 2026) at Ho on the theme, “Accelerating Adoption of Healthcare AI in Ghana: From Vision and Policy to Practice and Impact,” Prof. Moore said Ghana’s readiness for the next generation of AI, would depend on its ability to build strong data systems, regulatory frameworks and a digitally skilled health workforce.
Delivering a presentation on “Artificial Intelligence: How We Got Here and Why This Moment Matters – The Transition from AI to AGI and What it Means for Healthcare,” he traced AI’s evolution over the past seven decades, from rule-based systems through periods of stagnation to the current era of deep learning, generative AI and foundation models capable of processing text, images, audio and structured data simultaneously.
He explained that while AI technologies had become increasingly sophisticated, the greatest challenge for healthcare was no longer computational capability, but governance, accountability and safe clinical integration.
He noted that although early medical AI systems such as MYCIN demonstrated impressive diagnostic performance decades ago, they were never widely adopted because of integration challenges, legal liability, and the difficulty of maintaining expert knowledge.
Prof. Moore also observed that the deep learning revolution after 2012 accelerated breakthroughs in diabetic retinopathy screening, skin cancer detection, autonomous diagnostic systems, and protein structure prediction.
Unlike earlier systems designed for single tasks, today’s foundation models could perform multiple functions and adapt to new applications with minimal retraining.
He said AI capabilities were advancing faster than the evidence and regulatory mechanisms required to govern them.
Although more than 1,500 AI-enabled medical devices had received approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), only a few generative AI systems had been authorised for direct clinical diagnosis, with most current applications supporting documentation, electronic health records and administrative workflows.
On Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Prof. Moore said experts remained divided on when it would emerge, with projections ranging from the late 2020s to beyond the end of the century.
He stressed that healthcare did not require full AGI to experience significant transformation, adding that the real issue was determining how much autonomy should be delegated to AI in clinical decision-making.
Again, he described the emergence of “agentic AI” as a major development, enabling systems to plan tasks, access multiple information sources, evaluate their own outputs, and execute complex workflows under human supervision.
However, he maintained that AI should remain a decision-support tool, with healthcare professionals retaining responsibility for clinical judgement, ethics, empathy, and culturally appropriate care.
Prof. Moore said Africa stood to benefit enormously from AI, particularly in addressing shortages of specialist healthcare workers and improving access to quality healthcare in underserved communities.
He cited successful AI applications in tuberculosis screening, diabetic retinopathy detection and community disease surveillance but cautioned that African genomic, clinical and linguistic data remained underrepresented in global AI training datasets, creating risks of biases and inaccurate recommendations.
He therefore urged Ghana to invest in locally representative datasets, reliable computing infrastructure and indigenous AI solutions tailored to the country’s health system.
Highlighting Ghana’s progress, he showcased Khaya AI, an open-source language technology developed by Ghanaian researchers, to support healthcare communication in local languages, including Twi, Ewe, Ga, Dagbani and Frafra.
Prof. Moore further called for increased investment in AI education, research and digital infrastructure, while encouraging stronger collaboration among universities, government agencies, healthcare institutions and industry.
He said Ghana should position itself not merely as a consumer of AI technologies but as an active developer of solutions that reflected local realities, concluding that the future of AI in healthcare would ultimately depend on evidence, equity, governance and responsible human oversight.
Key partners of the event included the WHO, UNESCO, UNICEF, Health Facilities Regulator Agency (HEFRA), FDA, UGBS, UG, KATH, MOH, adb, Microsoft, Melcom, AU, EBID, and Africa CDC.
GNA
Edited by Maxwell Awumah/ Christabel Addo