No to AI in public hospitals, says Zimbabwe’s health minister

By Staff Reporter

Health and Child Care Deputy Minister Sleiman Timios Kwidini says the government will not introduce AI or roll out a fully fledged information communication technology to run the country’s public hospitals for fear of the system being hacked and patients’ medical records falling into the wrong hands.

He was responding to questions by MPs during the ministers’ question time in parliament on Wednesday.

Mbizo MP Corban Madzivanyika asked if he government was keen on introducing “AI to ensure that our Government hospitals use digital knowledge so that every record of every patient across the latitude of this country is well kept”.

Madzivanyika said some patients were often turned away from public hospitals when they would have forgotten their cards.

In his response, Kwidini said AI was a very essential tool to advance development and streamline processes “but not in hospitals”.

“As we are moving with technology, definitely AI is needed, but not in hospitals because AI can easily be hacked by these good technocrats.

“What we are saying is, as we are moving to digital, we want to make sure that everything is going to be computerised to make sure that if a patient comes to the hospital, each and every visit which they make is recorded in the system which is not easily hacked by anyone else who is outside, because we know that sickness or illness is a private situation to an individual.

“If we put these more into technology, we know how our technology is, we end up knowing each and everyone’s illness, which is not recommended by our own culture and people worldwide.”

The Zimbabwe government has been blamed for failure to adopt modern systems of running the country’s affairs with a lot of processes often depending on human interaction to fulfil.

The country got a rude awakening during the Covid-19 menace in 2021 when human interaction was suppressed, with people jumping on to digital systems to communicate.