Extracts below. Full text: https://www.ictworks.org/explain-chatgpt-community-health-worker/
By Wayan Vota on December 2, 2025 [from his LinkedIn profile, Wayan Vota is a Strategic Digital Transformation Leader based in the US]
'I’ve been diving deep into groundbreaking research on community health worker perceptions of AI applications in rural India. [The study] examines CHW responses to AI-enabled diagnostic tools, and it revealed that participants had very low levels of AI knowledge and often formed incorrect mental models about how these systems work. When CHWs watched a video of an AI app diagnosing pneumonia, many assumed:
- Generative AI worked the same way as human brains
- Or it was simply counting symptoms like heartbeats and breathing patterns...
'If [CHWs] can’t critically evaluate AI outputs, we risk amplifying rather than solving healthcare delivery problems...
'Instead of building increasingly sophisticated AI tools and hoping CHWs will figure them out, we need to start with fundamental digital health literacy that includes AI comprehension...
'Five Critical Questions to Answer...
1. How do you explain probabilistic outputs to someone who needs definitive clinical guidance?...
'Practical Next Steps for Responsible AI Deployment...
- Start with AI literacy, not app literacy. CHWs need foundational understanding of how AI systems learn, what data influences their outputs, and why they sometimes fail...
COMMENT (NPW): The author suggests all CHWs should have a foundational understanding of how AI systems learn. I would agree that it would be helpful to increase such understanding perhaps through simple educational resources/videos. But what level of understanding of AI is feasible across all CHWs, or indeed the general public? We perhaps need more research on how CHWs currently use AI, together with benefit and limitations/danger of doing so.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org