Many countries struggle to provide high-quality primary health care and achieve universal health coverage because of a shortage of trained clinicians. Consequently, citizens experience a variable standard of care depending on the level of training and experience of the health care workers in their community. Appropriate and user-friendly tools are needed that can provide on-demand, expert-level information and support to frontline health care workers to standardize care and treat more patients effectively.

Can artificial intelligence-assisted tools support better primary health care delivery? Artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools are increasingly being used to assist health care workers with diagnosis and treatment. These include large language model (LLM)-enabled tools that can provide expert-level medical knowledge and advice in response to health care workers’ queries. Because LLMs have the ability to be trained to think like a local medical expert, continuously learn, and provide responses to a wide range of queries, this technology is seen to have the potential to enhance clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and improve the quality of primary health care.