An AI tool called AI Consult, built on OpenAI's GPT-4o model, was trialled in primary care clinics in Nairobi, Kenya, to act as a "second pair of eyes" for clinicians by flagging potential errors in patient notes. The trial, sponsored by the global health nonprofit PATH in partnership with Penda Health, which runs 16 clinics in the city, matters because it represents one of the more rigorous real-world tests of whether AI oversight tools actually improve patient care, rather than just theoretical accuracy on test cases.

The tool uses a traffic-light system to flag clinical notes as green, yellow or red depending on the severity of a potential issue, at a running cost of just four cents per patient. In a randomised trial spanning almost 10,000 patient encounters, expert panels judged that clinicians using the tool produced better diagnoses and treatment plans, and one clinical officer credited it with catching a congenital heart defect she said she would otherwise have missed. However, the trial recorded only a 23% reduction in treatment failures that did not reach statistical significance, meaning no definitive proof of improved patient outcomes was established, and specialists such as orthopaedic surgeon Dr Nicholas Okumu cautioned that even approved AI tools can still cause harm without active human oversight.