The Thinking Healthcare System: Artificial Intelligence and Human Equity - Chapter 4: AI + public health: effective and fair collaboration

This chapter introduces the AI transformation of public health (PubHealth) uniting healthcare systems, by starting first with the central terms, concepts, and history of PubHealth from ancient quarantines to modern vaccines (particularly such milestone developments as successful responses to chronic and infectious diseases, sanitation, workplace safety, poverty, and wars). It highlights the 21st century's fundamental “global health” reformulation of PubHealth and anticolonial resistance (to a perceived cultural imperialism of the West including in PubHealth). It then moves on to the “The Great COVID Reset” with the global ethical AI pressure for PubHealth redesign to achieve more effective, efficient, and equitable PubHealth structures and collaboration globally to respond to such modern crises as the pandemic (which helped reveal the deep scientific, technical, and economic inequalities worldwide, and the lack of substantive solidarity and coordination of limited resources particularly in high-income countries with low- and middle-income countries). This backdrop informs the discussion of emerging trends framing ethical AI-enabled PubHealth: digitalization, deglobalization, and demographics (including decline and even implosion especially in the Global North). Within these trends, the chapter then examines the AI-enabled PubHealth piloted applications in population health (including in pandemic prevention and mRNA vaccines), “precision public health,” Pub-Health-supported healthcare system optimization (including design, inclusive international governance structures, AI “fundamental readiness,” AI “operational readiness”), and localized funding systems. The current and preceding chapter then inform the definition and defense of the mathematical formula to augment and automate AI-digital transformation of modern healthcare systems as “AI Health,” emphasizing sovereignty, solidarity, and success of PubHealth and precision medicine's relationship that is optimized by AI-enabled healthcare Big Data, all raised to the exponential power of AI-driven value-based health care.