AI adoption: Experts seek regulations to protect patients

Nigeria's healthcare experts have surveyed the arrival of artificial intelligence in their hospitals and reached, as one does, for the traditional instrument of the age: a summit. Guardian Nigeria reports that experts are seeking regulations to protect patients as AI adoption grows in healthcare, with discussions intended to 'feed into existing health policies and national planning.' Feed into. Marvellous verb. Nobody regulates anything any more; things are merely fed into other things, like a kitchen porter passing a plate to a kitchen porter. The patient, in this formulation, is a stakeholder, which is a promotion and a demotion at once.

The summit's stated deliverable is 'a national roadmap for AI and healthcare with policy recommendations.' A roadmap, for anyone who has sat through this film before, is a handsome document describing a route nobody has agreed to drive, set in a typeface that suggests urgency and laminated in a manner that suggests permanence. We watched the identical choreography when India's MeitY promised its own consultation paper not long ago: the machinery of governance producing artefacts about governance, while the actual deployments keep deploying and the actual procurement keeps procuring.

And who are these experts? The excerpt declines to say. No ministry, no regulator, no named clinician, no hospital, no date for the summit, no indication that its 'policy recommendations' would bind so much as a vending machine. Which is the trick of the whole genre: 'protect patients' is the universally beloved phrase that gets you through the door, and what walks back out again is a recommendation, addressed to whoever happens to be listening. The patients will, as ever, be protected by the same instrument that has protected them all along — the quiet hope that whoever sold the system is having a very good quarter.