About

The Grand Challenges Brazil Program, in partnership with Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Ministry of Health, National Development Council Scientific and Technological – CNPq, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invite interested parties to present proposals for promoting the equitable use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve global health.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significant potential to transform healthcare around the world. But as AI technology continues to advance, there is an urgent need to position low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to lead on the design and co-creation of AI-enabled technologies – thereby helping to improve the health and well-being of their women, children, and vulnerable communities. Through this call for proposal, they are emphasizing AI solutions that are locally driven and owned hence more relevant to address the needs of people they intend to serve and more likely to be accepted and used by local communities.

This call by the various GC partners is a follow-up to the initial call by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation representing collaborative steps towards identifying, nurturing, and catalyzing the creativity, energy, and skills that researchers, implementers, governments, and technical partners have demonstrated in solving specific challenges in their countries and regions through LLMs.

Lines of Research

• This notice seeks innovative approaches to using LLMs to promote global public health.

  • Line 1: Clinical decision support

    • Tools that can be used by healthcare professionals or frontline professionals to improve diagnosis and management of health conditions and/or the provision of health services.

    • Support for improvement and adherence to guidelines and good practices of health.

    • Support for the interpretation of diagnoses, cost reduction and overcoming geographic barriers in access to diagnosis and assistance.

  • Line 2: Public Health and formulation of public policies

    • Innovative and timely solutions that utilize data sources, routinely available text and voice (especially those that are underutilized or unused), to support formulators of public policies.

    • Innovative solutions that can reduce transition delays new evidence for policy and implementation, as well as optimize resource allocation.

    • Approaches that can refine information and extract timely recommendations from datasets complex and evolving (e.g. forecasting epidemics and disease progression).

  • Line 3: Support for frontline healthcare workers

    • Personalized training for healthcare professionals front with different levels of professional qualification, whether customized, highly relevant and leads to better quality service and/or lower costs.

    • LLM-backed solutions for workflow management work (e.g. writing medical discharge summaries, etc.)

    • Using LLMs to support frontline healthcare professionals qualified front in providing higher quality services and efficiency

  • Line 4: Health communications and patient trajectories

    • Develop communication tools that fulfill the language and literacy gaps when communicating knowledge, health-related messages and guidance (i.e., translation of local dialects, text to speech, etc.).

    • Provide timely, reliable and personalized guidance to users of the health system and vulnerable populations, and by doing so to overcome cultural, access and stigma concerns significant.

    • Support users to understand and manage their own health status health and care regime.

  • Line 5: Strengthening health systems

    • Using LLMs to improve data interoperability, health systems and programs.

Priority will be given to proposals that have:

• An explicit request for an AI-supported project

• Projects that have already completed a pilot before this Grand Call Challenges, and/or,

• Projects that have lessons/tools that can be transferred to other use cases/situations/contexts with minimal changes.

• Projects that emphasize the importance of community-specific AI, culturally appropriate and representative.

• Proposals that include a component of collaboration with others countries, especially in Africa and Latin America.

Funding Information

• The level of financing is an aid of up to R$500,000.00, for each project.

• The provided to the organization, with a term of up to 12 months.

What they are looking for?

• Proposals that demonstrate clear applications of LLMs or other sources with equivalent capabilities) to address a challenge specific issue related to global health in the context of the Brazilian SUS.

• Proposals that demonstrate that the researcher has a good understanding of the application, carried out part of the mapping of the parts interested parties and has an engagement plan with policy holders local decision making to ensure the proposal is successful.

• Proposals that present a high opportunity for scaling

• Proposals that outline a clear, viable and reproducible methodology.

• Proposals that have timely access to data, and engagement of stakeholders decision makers interested in using AI.

Eligibility

• The proposal must involve the participation of researchers from Brazilian institutions actively involved in innovation projects and production of local knowledge, without being restricted to the mere application of existing tools. Furthermore, the proposal must be included in the priorities of national policies of the Economic Health Industrial, local production and innovation to meet demands of the SUS and Digital Health.

Post Date: October 11, 2023