Elevator Pitch: Project S.A.R.A.H.

What we try to do with this is to provide accessible, reliable, and actionable health information to support people online. You can ask her anything about tobacco cessation, mental health, healthy lifestyles, alcohol consumption, or healthy nutrition. And you can engage with her in a discussion, face to face.

It’s a mix between governments, academic institutions, and private institutions. We receive voluntary contributions and have partnerships within [the WHO] and from Amazon Web Services, Google, George Washington University, and the government of Qatar. It’s difficult to say [how much it costs] because many things were in-kind contributions.

All our services are free of charge. All our projects start with an idea that we developed with partners. We are almost always dependent on external funding for any project we do. Normally we would say we need X dollars for a project. Here, we have a highly interested group of companies and partners.

Our audiences are very diverse: from policymakers to administrators in different sectors, different industries of the world—officials as well as the general public. [Sarah] scans millions of documents and WHO materials to provide concise and accurate summary answers, saving individuals hours of effort sifting through complex health guidelines.

The funding situation. We are dependent on external funding. But here we have a highly interested group of companies and partners as well.

Language is a problem. We would like her to speak many more languages and that requires a lot more resources.

On the technical side, we’ve seen so much misinformation and disinformation. We have more to do on training (the AI engine) and adjusting the guardrails. We’d like to continue building on this experience, to add more topics. That depends on where Sarah ends up going.

We publish manuals that—for example, on mental health—outline how you actually deal with your depression. We measure, of course, how many times have these reports been downloaded. But we can’t say for certain if they have been read, and by how many people, once downloaded.

There are completely new people searching for information on the major websites and meeting Sarah. Interactions with people, by far, outweigh the downloads of these records. [Editor’s note: In the most recent six-month period, there were 200,000 visits to the Sarah landing page, leading to 70,000 conversations.] It’s much more accessible now for people to ask questions and get some answers.

We also have user surveys. Over 85 percent of respondents are saying that [Sarah] was good or excellent at helping them answer their health queries.

This is a novel way of looking at public health communications and information. We want to be at the forefront [of AI], on the cutting edge. WHO would like to be a global leader in guiding how this technology can support public health. Is Project S.A.R.A.H. something that could be licensed in some fashion to public health organizations around the globe to adapt for their own purposes, using AI with people in their communities? We’re not there yet because we haven’t fully understood many of the challenges that we’re still facing. [But] we’ve got something here, so let’s see where we go.