Integrating Artificial Intelligence Into Public Health Education and Healthcare: Lessons from Covid-19 and Monkeypox and for Future Pandemic Preparedness

Salim Fredericks^1*Mustapha Abdelouahed²Dana Yateem¹Chadi Amzil³Ilyas Aribi⁴El Hassan Abdelwahed⁵

• ¹Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Bahrain), Al Muharraq, Bahrain
• ²Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• ³College of Applied Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• ⁴Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, School of Life Sciences, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
• ⁵Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences Semlalia, Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech, Morocco

Higher education institutions are accustomed to sudden and abrupt jolts that provoke poor enrollments, unviable courses, unsustainable practices, budget cuts, and job losses. Such a situation arose with the worldwide education crisis of Covid-19 and the global mandate to shift to online teaching and learning. Guidelines based upon available and accessible solutions, often made by leaders with little experience in online teaching, prevailed. Good online instruction and lesson planning started instructions rather than pragmatic policy adoptions. This article examines practices at higher education institutions during the Covid-19 outbreak and explores how the pandemic impacted different countries' learning and teaching processes. Insight is here provided into adaptations made during the Covid-19 era and the aftermath for higher education in general, public health education, its workforce training, and healthcare in particular, with actionable recommendations for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and the lessons of Covid-19 into public health education and healthcare. To illustrate how pandemic preparedness and public health education incorporating AI-driven epidemiological modeling could address future outbreaks, we give an example of the case of the ongoing monkeypox virus (Mpox) outbreaks. Worldwide, the Mpox outbreak could emerge as a public health threat. The remote learning and teaching implemented and applied during the Covid-19 pandemic has taught the world to prepare the educational system for potential uncertainties, like the ongoing outbreaks of Mpox, and how the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic can help reform public health education, the workforce training, and healthcare. In the next few years, AI can potentially transform epidemic and pandemic preparedness. It will help better anticipate where outbreaks will start and predict their trajectory, using terabytes of routinely collected climatic and socio-economic data. It might also help predict the impact of disease outbreaks on individual patients by studying the interactions between the immune system and emerging pathogens. Suppose AI is integrated into countries’ pandemic response systems; its advances will potentially save lives and ensure the world is better prepared for future epidemic and pandemic threats.