16/07/2026
As Artificial Intelligence Drives Health
Innovations, UN Agencies Launch Joint Strategic
Guidelines
As artificial intelligence drives rapid health
innovations, global guardrails, equitable data,
and local capacity are needed to ensure equitable
progress. To address this, a landmark framework
launched by three United Nations agencies lays
out a strategic roadmap for innovators.
Meanwhile, health leaders emphasise that lower-
income regions must become co-creators of future
innovations.
New guidelines for the use of artificial
intelligence lay out a roadmap for health
innovators to navigate complex intellectual
property, data governance, and regulatory
pathways. The landmark framework, co-authored by
experts from the World Health Organization (WHO),
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU),
and the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), was presented at the “AI for Good” Global
Summit in Geneva last week.
“This collaboration between these three
organisations brings our expertise together and
shows how we can have a collaboration in this
very important field,” said Dalila Hamou,
director of the external relations division at
WIPO, at the Summit.
The joint initiative arrives as technological
innovation accelerates, with the number of new
generative artificial intelligence patents
published over the last two years topping the
total from the entire preceding decade. For
instance, AI-assisted liquid biopsy tests can now
predictively detect multiple cancers at stage one
– when survival rates reach up to 92% – long
before physical symptoms manifest.
At the same time, critics warn that the rapid
deployment of unregulated advanced algorithms
increases risks and may end up amplifying
existing health disparities and deepening social
exclusion.
“The few exceptions when technology actually had
an equitable positive impact in society was when
equity was included by design,” said Ricardo
Baptista Leite, CEO of HealthAI, in an interview
with Health Policy Watch during the summit,
echoing the need for guardrails.
Fundamentally, the joint framework, which is
entirely non-biding, recommends a mixed
intellectual property system for new AI tools. It
guides developers in strategically combining
patents for technical methods with trade secrets
for proprietary datasets, ensuring commercial
viability – while also building trust through
careful adherence to quality assurance, safety
monitoring and patient privacy.
But to actively embed equity into the innovation
life cycle, the joint framework also champions
access models such as differential pricing and
field-of-use licensing. These mechanisms allow
patent holders to serve profitable commercial
markets while partnering with domestic
manufacturers in the Global South for vital
technology transfers.
Specifically, field-of-use licensing allows
patent holders to legally differentiate their
intellectual property rights by geography or
therapeutic application. This means a developer
can maintain exclusive, highly profitable sales
in the Global North while simultaneously
licensing the identical algorithm to a domestic
partner in a lower-income region.
Similarly, differential pricing leverages
flexible delivery methods, such as cloud-based
architectures, to offer tiered access to
artificial intelligence services. This mechanism
ensures that resource-constrained health systems
pay reduced, subsidised fees for vital diagnostic
tools, while the same technology generates
premium commercial revenue in wealthier markets.
Since the international guidelines lack the
binding enforcement mechanisms needed to
standardise protections globally, voluntary
frameworks must be actively translated into
enforceable national regulations, the 2025
HealthAI Global Landscape Report stresses.
Fiscal pressure drives new collaborations
The urgency to implement these global standards
is driven by the fast-changing face of the
technologies as well as severe economic
pressures, which are prompting health systems to
leverage largely unregulated artificial
intelligence tools for rapid efficiency gains
and/or to reach underserved populations.
“We can’t expect every country to suddenly find
money in this current fiscal context that they’ve
not had for the last 10 years,” said John
Fairhurst, head of private sector engagement at
the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria, during a panel discussion with Gavi the
Vaccine Alliance, and Google.org at last week’s
AI for Good summit in Geneva. He noted that AI
offers a pathway forward because “what countries
are looking for is efficiencies. They’re looking
for the ability to drive greater impact from
every dollar that they spend.”
One breakthrough innovation highlighted at the
summit pairs acoustic analysis with machine
learning to detect tuberculosis directly from the
sound of a patient’s cough. This tool, currently
still in pilot stages, can be scaled up rapidly
over basic mobile networks to identify people
infected with TB earlier in the infection cycle.
“It’s a disease where we miss something like 3.6
to 4 million people a year, and those people go
on to infect more people,” added Fairhurst.
This tool is part of a wider strategic
partnership between The Global Fund and
Google.org, the corporate social responsibility
arm of Google, highlighting the advantages of
public-private sector collaborations in a fast-
developing AI landscape.
“Rather than focusing on a singular or point-to-
point partnership, we try to bring together the
cross-functional players [and] the cross-sector
players,” said Leslie Yeh, director of scientific
progress for Google.org. She explained that by
treating health challenges as interconnected
systems, partners can share learnings “so that we
can get towards this accelerated outcome together
and […] not leave anyone behind.”
Empowering local health capacity
To effectively serve resource-limited settings
and build local health capacities, developers
must also design digital health tools capable of
working entirely offline or with limited power
and internet data access.
“If you think about low or limited settings that
we come from, then you have to ensure that you
have models that can work, for example, offline
or with devices that are limited,” emphasised
Joyce Nabende, head of the artificial
intelligence lab at Makerere University in
Uganda.
Innovators are currently working to make new
technologies accessible by deploying AI
diagnostic tools directly onto portable phones
and other devices. For example, healthcare
providers in parts of rural Africa can use
offline, AI-assisted ultrasound tools to triage
pregnancy risks, so that only the most at-risk
cases travel to distant specialist centres.
Beyond hardware adaptations, international tech
researchers and leaders like Nabende stress that
true empowerment requires cultivating
technological expertise directly where the
medical challenges occur. This strategic shift
involves transferring more advanced digital
capabilities into the Global South.
Bridging the data equity divide
Another problem involves deploying algorithms in
low- and middle-income countries without
representative foundational data, which currently
risks perpetuating systemic health disparities.
Hidden biases within imported models can trigger
inappropriate clinical triaging and inadvertently
cause severe patient harm.
“When we import models, they’re often trained on
usually high-income countries, populations that
don’t represent the target populations where
these tools are meant to be deployed,” said Alain
Labrique, director of data, digital health,
analytics and AI at the WHO, during a panel
discussion.
Approximately 90% of global genomic data
currently belongs to people of European descent,
dangerously skewing the efficacy of predictive
tools for diverse global populations, warned
Alireza Haghighi, director of the Harvard
International Center for Genetic Disease, during
the summit.
Consequently, governments in the Global South
demand an active role as co-creators of medical
AI technologies that have to undergo rigorous
local validation before clinical deployment.
“Africa must not be only a market for digital
health solutions,” said Habiba Mizouni,
representing the Tunisian Ministry of Health,
during a keynote speech at the summit. She
asserted that the continent must become a
producer of ethical and context-specific health
AI, not merely a consumer of imported digital
solutions.
To actively support this transition, the newly
launched guidelines champion access models that
enable the adaptation of algorithms to local
disease patterns and require developers to share
performance data across diverse populations to
ensure algorithmic non-discrimination.
Addressing regulatory fragmentation
A major issue hindering these equitable advances
is regulatory fragmentation, which prevents
emerging developers from safely scaling their
life-saving tools.
“Small and medium enterprises don’t stand a
chance if they have to deal with different
regulatory environments in every country they go
to,” said HealthAI’s Leite. The Geneva-based
global non-profit agency supports governments in
building regulatory ecosystems to responsibly
assess and scale these AI technologies.
To construct this infrastructure, the agency is
building a Global Regulatory Network (GRN) that
recently expanded to include Zambia, the
Philippines, and Brazil. While artificial
intelligence powerhouses like the United States
and China remain outside formal GRN membership,
they actively engage through broader communities
of practice to prevent geopolitical fracturing,
Leite explained.
To align internationally fragmented systems, the
network is currently developing a global early
warning system for post-market monitoring of new
digital tools and devices. This shared platform
will allow international regulators to instantly
detect and communicate adverse algorithmic
events, ensuring patient safety while building
long-term societal trust in adaptive
technologies, echoing the goals of the joint UN
guidelines.
Build trust to keep innovation at pace
As long as the regulatory landscape remains
fragmented, both developers and patients are
ultimately penalised by delayed access to life-
saving medical diagnostics, the UN agencies
state. The new framework directly addresses this
systemic friction by proposing common
intellectual property strategies and technical
standards.
“Standards create trust. Without standards,
innovation remains isolated. With standards,
innovation becomes scalable and sustainable,”
concluded Tunisian representative Mizouni.
Ultimately, the enthusiasm that greeted the new
WHO, ITU, and WIPO joint report signals a
readiness to govern digital health. If
international guardrails support collaborative
momentum and trust, the current wave of
technological innovation could successfully
reduce global health inequities and scale the
life-saving tuberculosis and cancer breakthroughs
presented in Geneva.
However, to translate these frameworks into
reality, international regulators and national
governments must accelerate to match the rapid
pace of the technology itself. Building this
regulatory legitimacy is the only way to ensure
patient safety and global adoption because, as
HealthAI CEO Leite emphasised, “Innovation will
move at the speed of trust”.
Echoing HealthAI’s collaborative mission, Dr Hans
Henri Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe,
reinforced this urgency during a global
conference in Lisbon starting on Wednesday where
the WHO brought 37 countries together to
establish AI governance.
Urging leaders to regulate artificial
intelligence in health “before the gaps become
irreversible”, Kluge stressed: “The future of AI
in health won’t be decided by algorithms. It will
be decided by the frameworks we build now, the
partnerships we forge, and the political will we
bring to making sure this technology serves
everyone – not just the countries and communities
wealthy enough to shape it on their own terms”.
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