Tufton: AI can assist critical healthcare staffing shortage
Published:Saturday | April 26, 2025 | 12:11 AMLivern Barrett/Senior Staff Reporter
Jamaica could take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to help plug the significant shortage of human capital across the healthcare sector, Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has suggested.
The proposal was made yesterday at the launch of Vox Technology Limited, a pioneering Jamaican company that specialises in “cutting-edge” AI-powered solutions across several sectors, including healthcare, security and tourism.
Chief Executive Officer of Vox Technology, Ranjita Sanumpudi, said her company is redefining how local industries function, using real-time intelligence data to help entities across the tourism, manufacturing, security, health and retail sectors make “smarter, faster decisions”.
Tufton indicated, as an example, that the human capital shortage across the local health sector is so bad in some areas that Jamaica now has to consider reading scanned images remotely.
“The equipment that captures these images or does the lab tests has to carry the capacity and the intelligence to give a result based on a reading that may not happen within the room, in the space or in the country where the imaging and tests are done,” he said at the launch of Vox Technology.
“How AI interacts with that? I don’t know, I am giving you the ideas, you can come with the proposals and I am open. But those are challenges that we solve going into the future and the not-too-distant future, particularly in the context of us building out new hospitals.”
The health minister acknowledged, however, that one of the challenges with the proposed digital advance is going to be the willingness of some professionals to embrace it.
“Even at the highest levels of learning, doctors with three and four degrees … they still sometimes insist on using the film from the X-ray and holding them up under the light as opposed to the image on the phone because it’s a habit,” he said.
Tufton predicted that one of the biggest challenges his ministry will face is getting health professionals to embrace this new digital approach, “particularly if that new approach appears to take away control from those who are accustomed to having absolute and total control”.
As a result, he delivered a clear warning to companies planning to approach the health ministry with digital solutions.
“If you are coming with the technology and you are not coming with a change-management plan assigned to it, I am telling you now I am going to reject it because it is going to be a waste of money,” he said.
“The fanciness of everything gets placed in the organisation and nobody uses it.”
‘AI WILL TRANSFORM JOBS’
Tufton’s Cabinet colleague, Technology Minister Daryl Vaz, echoed the same theme, noting that one of the most important messages the Jamaican population should understand is that AI is not here to replace people.
“It is here to empower them. This is a misconception that AI will eliminate jobs. The truth is quite the opposite: AI will transform jobs across the world. AI can assist doctors with diagnostics, but the human touch remains irreplaceable,” Vaz said during the launch ceremony for Vox Technology.
It is estimated that the value of AI-driven technology across the Caribbean and Latin America will climb to $1.2 trillion by 2030, according to Dr Andre Haughton, opposition spokesman on technology.
He said Jamaica must ensure that its citizens are properly trained to use technology in a fulsome way.