Across industries, classrooms and workplaces, people are harnessing artificial intelligence to enhance their work in ways that extend beyond human capability — and public health is no exception.

With the right guardrails, policies and insights, AI has the potential to become an essential tool for public health professionals, said Kais Gadhoumi, assistant professor at the Duke University School of Nursing and presenter at the Saturday APHA 2025 Learning Institute “Harnessing AI for Public Health Research: From Formulating Problems to Presenting Results.”

“I think AI will help us actually in our everyday job — whether we do research, whether we do clinical practice, whether you are a public health or community health researcher or practitioner,” Gadhoumi said. 

Among Saturday’s AI session attendees, about 40% worked in academia, followed by 25% in epidemiology and data science, and 10% in health policy. 

Nearly half reported disease surveillance, risk modeling and personalized interventions as the area they are most interested in applying AI to, followed by applications to health equity, ethics and addressing disparities.

Jason Hodges, director of research and clinical studies at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, is interested in learning to use AI for routine task in his daily work.

“It makes it a lot easier, and it’s interesting to me,” Hodges said. 

While AI has vast possibilities to streamline and automate work for public health professionals through things such as disease detection, resource optimization, virtual nursing and early warning monitoring, many in the field have yet to harness the technology. 

Only 5% of local health departments reported using AI as of 2024, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials’ 2024 Public Health Informatics Profile.

Learning to harness AI is essential for public health workers to be able to use it effectively. Just like self-driving cars, AI requires a human component to continually monitor it, Gahoumi said. 

“We have to have guide rails, and we have to set rules on how to use it," he said. “Everything we get from the AI has to be verifiable.” 

Elizabeth Manis, a research support specialist at the Maternal Health Disparities Research Center at Tennessee State University, attended the session to learn how to adapt AI into teaching and mentoring.

“I think it’s a useful tool as long as we learn how to harness it and make sure that we use it properly,” she said.

Photo by Drazen_, courtesy iStockphoto.