KARACHI: The provincial health department, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and Aga Khan University (AKU) have signed a three-year letter of collaboration to integrate a national AI Hub for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health into the public health system across Sindh.

The agreement was signed at the office of Sindh Health Minister Dr Azra Fazal Pechuho earlier this week, by Health Secretary Tahir Hussain, LUMS Associate Professor Dr Maryam Mustafa and Dean AKU Medical College Dr Karim Damji.

The attendees included Dr Anita Zaidi, President of Gender Equality at the Gates Foundation, and AKU paediatrics & child health Associate Professor Dr Zahra Hoodbhoy, who has been working on point-of-care ultrasound AI models.

According to officials, the Gates Foundation is supporting the hub through a multi-year grant. The partnership aims to bring artificial intelligence to frontline care to improve health indi-cators for the most vulnerable women and children.

The three institutions will jointly roll out risk-stratification models, clinical decision-support systems, and voiceassisted tools for frontline care providers delivering maternal and child health services.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Pechuho said she was targeting primary health facilities in this initiative.

`I would like to see healthier babies, and prematurity rates go down,` she said, adding that she hoped it would help identify congenital problems and improve paramedical services as well.

The AI hub is a culmination of a multiyear collaboration between computer scientists, human-centred design experts and clinical epidemiologists. Its clinical backbone comes from the work of AKU`s Dr Fyezah Jehan, Chair of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health who is the Lead for the Hub`s Clinical Research.

Her clinical trial networks, maternalnewborn cohort datasets, and field-based epidemiological research provide the real-world clinical validation required to train accurate predictive algorithms,ensuring the AI models are built on highquality clinical data and responsive to the realities of healthcare delivery in low-resource settings.

`We have brilliant faculty and that`s the magic,` said AKU`s Dean Karim Damji after signing. `I think it`s fantastic because we are serving pe ople better, in this case maternal, newborn, child health and looking at ways to understand what value we can offer for safer deliveries for the mothers, but also for the children. We have to embrace [AI] and try to make it as cost effective and efficient as possible.

The hub`s technology builds on Dr Maryam Mustafa`s `Awaaz-i-Sehat`, a voice-enabled electronic record management platform first funded under a Grand Challenges grant. Her team`s work in localised speech recognition and natural language architectures designed for low-literacy environments lets frontline health workers interact with AI tools seamlessly in their own languages.

`One of the things that worries me the most as a computer scientist working in AI and health is that Pakistan is far, far behind other countries when it comes toadopting AI tools,` said Dr Maryam Mustafa.

`And part of the reason is that we don`t have a formalised data infrastructure that can help scale AI tools. The tech part is actually easier to build. It is how do you embed it in existing infrastructures and get governments to adopt and scale. Even the most remote areas should have access to these tools,` Dr Mustafa said.

Under the partnership, the health department provides strategic oversight, provincial facility integration, alignment with national health policies and public sector deployment, while LUMS serves as technical partner, leading model development, algorithm validation, speech technologies and technical safeguards.

`The AKU acts as the clinical, research, and implementation partner, guiding clinical safety, real-world trial evaluation and field translation across primary care facilities,` shared an official.

The cooperation adheres strictly to national regulatory standards, data privacy guidelines and ethical safeguards, with a core commitment that AI solutions assist, never replace, clinical judgement, he added.