Keynote Abstract

Healthcare is not a single system but systems of systems: an organisation of people, institutions and resources whose only legitimate purpose is to meet the health needs of a population (WHO, 2000). Quality, in turn, is the degree to which those services increase the likelihood of desired outcomes while remaining consistent with current professional knowledge (IOM, 1990, 2001). These two definitions, written before the current wave of artificial intelligence, remain the most demanding test we can apply to it. This keynote argues that much of today's digital health agenda has inverted the relationship between quality and technology and reflects on that using critical examples.

The address opens by distinguishing digital health from digital health transformation. The distinction matters because technology adoption is easily counted, whereas transformation must be demonstrated through outcomes. Drawing on the speaker's Healthcare Quality Road-mapping approach and his framework of Twelve Quality Requirements (12 QRs) underpinning the Digital and AI Healthcare Model, the keynote proposes road-mapping and associated challenges in which every AI deployment is specified, validated and audited against explicit quality requirements rather than against vendor claims or market momentum.

The journey of AI in healthcare is then examined critically across four domains:

1. Its historical evolution from rule-based systems to deep learning.


2. The challenge of integration, where turn promising systems into sources of delay and error.


3. The ethical dimension, whether AI can remain accountable, fair and transparent enough to sustain trust.


4. The under-examined opportunity of AI in regulation itself, with the potential need for adaptive regulatory compliance.

Throughout, the keynote confronts the uncomfortable evidence and argues that these are not only technical failures but failures of quality management, and that both should therefore be largely, if never entirely, preventable. The address closes with a direct challenge to the leaders of academic and healthcare institutions: are universities and healthcare organisations the only institutions capable of producing the clinically literate technologists and technologically literate clinicians that governed transformation requires?

Biography

Professor Mohammed Odeh is devoted to bridging the divide in healthcare by advancing capacity-building initiatives harnessed through digital transformation and AI technologies. His efforts focus on enhancing digital access and delivering equitable, high-quality care across diverse populations, irrespective of geographic or socioeconomic barriers. As President and CEO of the Global Academy for Digital Health (GA4DH), he also serves as Professor of Digital Health and has established the GA4DH strategic framework for digitally- and AI-enabled healthcare capacity development, aimed at enhancing the patient journey through more inclusive, data-driven healthcare services underpinning global health equity.

Professor Odeh’s recent work includes founding 16 multidisciplinary Digital Health and AI Councils within GA4DH, with globally distinguished adjunct scholars. He orchestrated and led the founding of over 180 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses, contributing to the development of a skilled workforce capable of supporting evidence-based digital transformation in health services.

A graduate of the University of Bath (PhD, 1993), his thesis was highly regarded, passing the viva with no corrections and was recommended for the 1994 British Distinguished Dissertations Scheme—an acknowledgment of the merit of his research. Throughout his career, Professor Odeh has secured over £3.5 million in research funding, notably participating as UWE Bristol co-investigator (with Professor McClatchey as the Principal Investigator) in EU Framework Programmes (e.g., FP5, FP6, FP7), including the internationally acclaimed MammoGrid project, the first grid-based federated intelligent mammography platform involving partner institutions such as UWE Bristol, CERN, Oxford, Cambridge, Università Di Sassari, Istituto di Radiologia di Udine, and Università di Pisa.

Mohammed served as KHCC Professor of Cancer Care Informatics at the King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC), Jordan (2018–2024), a role that marked the first formally awarded professorial title in Cancer Care Informatics worldwide. This appointment followed an innovative secondment agreement between the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), UK, and KHCC, signalling an early institutional recognition of informatics as a core pillar of modern cancer care rather than a peripheral support function. Building on his research in informatics enabled cancer care for more than two decades, he founded the conceptualisation, and the academic design of the first MSc programme in Cancer Care Informatics, which he subsequently co-directed, co-evolved and co-operationalised as a joint initiative between KHCC and the University of Jordan, while serving as the seconded CCI professor from UWE Bristol. The programme has since produced a new cadre of professionals who are actively reshaping the cancer patient journey—bridging clinical practice, data science, and systems design, towards digitally and AI enabled cancer patient journey, to tackle real-world challenges in quality, safety, and patient experience in general.

Mohammed has been KHCC Professor of Cancer Care Informatics at King Hussein Cancer Center (KHCC), Jordan (2018–2024), becoming the first globally awarded Professorial title in Cancer Care Informatics, following the initial secondment agreement between the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, and KHCC in Jordan. He founded the conceptualisation of developing the 1st MSc programme in Cancer Care Informatics, which he later co-directed as the 1st MSc in Cancer Care Informatics programme (as joint initiative between KHCC and the University of Jordan, and the seconded