The Current Roles of AI in Public Health Practice: Scoping Review.

@article{harrison2026current,
  title = {{The Current Roles of AI in Public Health Practice: Scoping Review.}},
  author = {Sean Harrison and Claire Tatton and G J Melendez-Torres and Joelle Kirby and Sophie Robinson and Daniel Mutanda and Alisha Davies and Jessica M Armitage and Rabeea'h Waseem Aslam and Tom Arthur and Joht Singh Chandan and Ruth Garside and Jo Thompson Coon and Rhiannon Evans},
  journal = {Journal of medical Internet research},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.2196/108250},
  url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42956087},
  note = {CC BY},
}

TY  - JOUR
TI  - The Current Roles of AI in Public Health Practice: Scoping Review.
AU  - Sean Harrison
AU  - Claire Tatton
AU  - G J Melendez-Torres
AU  - Joelle Kirby
AU  - Sophie Robinson
AU  - Daniel Mutanda
AU  - Alisha Davies
AU  - Jessica M Armitage
AU  - Rabeea'h Waseem Aslam
AU  - Tom Arthur
AU  - Joht Singh Chandan
AU  - Ruth Garside
AU  - Jo Thompson Coon
AU  - Rhiannon Evans
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/29
JO  - Journal of medical Internet research
DO  - 10.2196/108250
UR  - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42956087
AB  - Background  AI is a broad field encompassing various techniques, which include algorithms that learn from data to perform automated tasks without explicit human programming. Public health aims to protect and improve the health of communities and populations at the local, regional, national, and global levels, but it typically has limited resources. While AI may lead to improved efficiency or effectiveness of public health interventions, the adoption of AI interventions should be informed by evidence of effective use in practice.Objective  This review aims to summarize how AI-assisted interventions are currently used by public health professionals.Methods  We conducted a scoping review to identify the current uses of AI in public health. We searched MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), Web of Science (Core Collection), and Scopus for relevant reports published between January 1, 2020, and July 24, 2025. Two reviewers independently screened reports. Eligible reports were primary studies (experimental or observational), commentaries, and editorials that discussed how AI tools have been used in practice in public health contexts relevant to high-income countries, excluding outbreaks. Data were extracted by one reviewer and checked by a second.Results  We screened 5400 records and 155 full texts, including 8 reports. These reports discussed a variety of uses of AI tools across public health domains: 3 reports used chatbots in different settings, 1 report used machine learning to forecast health service demand, 2 reports used AI for symptom checking, and 2 reports used AI for evidence synthesis. While assessing the effectiveness of AI tools for public health was beyond the scope of this review, and most reports did not robustly evaluate effectiveness, the evidence for the effectiveness of AI tools was nonetheless mixed. One report described a chatbot that users found helpful, while another found a specific chatbot to be ineffective, highlighting its potential to undermine trust in the organization that developed it. Another report highlighted both benefits and drawbacks of a large language model used to communicate with socially isolated individuals. The main finding of this review was that even with a comprehensive search across multiple databases, there were few reports of how AI tools are being used in practice in public health contexts.Conclusions  The lack of evidence from public health practice, excluding outbreaks, makes it difficult to know which uses of AI, if any, would be useful to incorporate into practice in high-income countries. In the absence of evidence, new interventions, including those using AI, should be evaluated to ensure they are effective (and cost-effective). These evaluations should be widely and accessibly disseminated to create an evidence base that other public health teams could use to inform their own decisions around AI tools.
SN  - 1439-4456
SN  - 1438-8871
ER  -