Online Reporter
Rutendo Nyeve, Victoria Falls Reporter
STAKEHOLDERS in the health sector have amplified calls for the rapid digitisation of the country’s health records powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a critical step towards building a robust healthcare system and eradicating widespread health fraud.
The recommendations emerged at the recent 2025 AHFoZ Healthcare Innovation Workshop, which was held here under the theme: “Innovating towards a resilient future”.
International and local experts participating at the event, which seeks to chart a new course for healthcare delivery agreed that Zimbabwe must urgently embrace digital transformation to leapfrog existing challenges.
In her address titled Reimagining Healthcare Leadership in the Age of AI: Strategies for Innovation and Resilience, Dr Joyline Josamu of Mimshack Royal Heritage, South Africa, said there was a need for Zimbabwe to establish a unified national health database.
“I recommend that we digitise all the health records from different hospitals into one big health database in Zimbabwe. This is going to help us track patients and also be able to be proactive in the way we deal with primary health care,” she said.
She illustrated her point with a practical example, explaining that for HIV patients, a digitised system could send alerts if a patient misses a medication collection, flagging prolonged absences as a critical health risk.
“The system can be linked to the patient’s phone, and the patient can receive an alert to say you have skipped your date of medication. It can send another message reminding the patient to pick their medication,” said Dr Josamu.
Beyond individual patient care, she emphasised the predictive power of AI in safeguarding public health.
“When the information is digitised and using artificial intelligence, you are able to predict the things that are going to happen next year,” she said.
By analysing historical data, health officials could forecast disease outbreaks for specific communities or seasons, enabling proactive resource allocation and preventative measures.
“If you know that in Mutoko, there is always cholera in the month of November, then you are going to put in place systems and structures and also raising awareness so that those things do not happen again and it can only happen if you have got real data using artificial intelligence,” she said.
She identified digitisation as the most potent weapon against the rampant fraud plaguing the health sector.
“You see that in the health sector, there is a lot of fraud and that fraud is because the information is not digitised,” she said.
A centralised digital system would create an auditable trail for every medicine packet, from central warehouse to patient, making it impossible to siphon supplies undetected.
This would ensure efficient management of medical supplies and financial resources across the entire national health infrastructure.
This sentiment was echoed by Mr Subhabrata Paul, co-founder and CEO of CarePlix Healthcare, India, who spoke on improving health using AI.
He positioned AI as a transformative global force that Zimbabwe cannot afford to ignore.
“So, bringing a digital revolution using AI, that is something all the countries are coming up and this is where I think Zimbabwe should focus on,” said Mr Paul.
He highlighted the life-saving potential of AI-driven preventive screening, which can provide critical health metrics in seconds.
“This kind of technology should be adapted to every country’s citizen so that we can do our early screening before it is too late. Because once it is late, there is a cost involved, there is a healthcare risk involved,” said Mr Paul.
He said AI enables early diagnosis and preventive action with minimal data sets.
It was noted during the sessions that the future of a resilient, efficient and fraud-free healthcare system in Zimbabwe lies in the immediate and decisive adoption of digital records and artificial intelligence.
