Pakistan’s first national convening on artificial intelligence in healthcare was held at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering at LUMS, bringing together clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and technology innovators under the National AI Hub to address what participants described as a critical inflection point for the country’s digital health ecosystem. The convening heard calls for urgent system-wide reform to move beyond fragmented pilots and scale digital health solutions nationwide, with speakers highlighting that while multiple artificial intelligence-driven health innovations exist in Pakistan, most remain confined to pilot stages due to the absence of integrated infrastructure and governance mechanisms needed for national scale-up.
Opening the session, Associate Professor and Director of the National AI Hub at LUMS Dr. Maryam Mustafa said Pakistan’s artificial intelligence for the health landscape is active but highly fragmented, with innovation spread across hospitals, universities, startups, and government programmes working in isolation. She said this has led to duplication of effort and prevented promising pilots from scaling, adding that breakthroughs are not transferring across the ecosystem. She called for a unified national map of artificial intelligence tools, datasets, and healthcare deployments. The absence of such a map means that institutions and programmes continue developing solutions that may already exist elsewhere in the system, while patients in underserved regions remain unable to benefit from innovations that are technically ready but institutionally trapped within the boundaries of the organisations that developed them.
The structural problem Dr. Mustafa identified is one that has been visible in Pakistan’s health technology landscape for several years. The country has seen genuine innovation across telemedicine platforms, diagnostic support tools, electronic health records, and disease surveillance systems, but each has typically emerged as a standalone project tied to a specific institution, donor, or government initiative, without the interoperability standards, shared data infrastructure, or policy frameworks needed to connect them into a coherent national system. The result is a health technology ecosystem that is impressive in its breadth of activity but limited in its cumulative impact, because the pieces do not talk to each other and the lessons from one deployment rarely inform the next.
Organisers said the convening marked an early step toward building a national roadmap for artificial intelligence in healthcare and shifting from isolated innovation to coordinated system-level transformation. The National AI Hub at LUMS has been positioned as a coordinating body for Pakistan’s broader artificial intelligence research ecosystem, and its role in convening Pakistan’s first national health artificial intelligence gathering signals an intent to extend that coordination specifically into healthcare, working alongside Pakistan Digital Authority’s Digital Innovation Lab for Health and other institutional actors to give the country’s fragmented health technology landscape the strategic coherence it has so far lacked.
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