Rwanda Health Intelligence Centre — AI platform for real-time disease surveillance and health investment planning

Rwanda's Ministry of Health, working with technology partner Sand Technologies and implementation partner Society for Family Health, has built a multi-layered digital health infrastructure across the country's predominantly rural population. At its core is the Rural Health Operating System (RHOS), an AI-powered platform that connects previously fragmented data from electronic medical records (eBuzima, cEMR), the logistics system (eLMIS), disease surveillance (DHIS2), population health tracking (WelTel) and civil registration (CRVS) into a single, actionable view. More than 125 rural health posts have been digitised with electronic medical records, Starlink satellite connectivity and solar power. The programme has run since 2022 and remains ongoing.

The programme aims to give Rwanda's health system real-time, unified visibility into disease patterns, service delivery and population health across a largely rural country. A central objective is to detect and anticipate disease outbreaks earlier, with predictive tools designed to flag outbreaks up to three months in advance. A complementary aim, pursued through the Healthcare Investment Planning Tool, is to help planners identify healthcare deserts and optimal clinic locations, working toward a national goal of all citizens living within 30 minutes of a healthcare facility.

Implementation activities included digitising more than 125 rural health posts with electronic medical records, satellite internet and solar power, and integrating multiple existing national data systems into the unified RHOS platform. The Health Intelligence Centre (HIC) was formally inaugurated by Health Minister Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana on 3 April 2025 at the Global AI Summit for Africa, serving as the national platform for real-time data collection, processing and analysis. A Healthcare Investment Planning Tool was also built on Google's Open Buildings satellite-imagery dataset to support facility-location planning.

Data quality across the connected systems has exceeded 85% on completeness, timeliness and accuracy, and healthcare worker satisfaction rose from 60% to 80%. Reduced manual reporting has freed clinical staff approximately three days per month. The Health Intelligence Centre has already been used to identify drivers of maternal mortality, target HIV prevention resources, screen household contacts of TB patients at scale, and maintain mpox outbreak surveillance. The Healthcare Investment Planning Tool has reduced facility-location planning cycles from weeks of field surveys to minutes, supporting Rwanda's goal of reducing average travel time to a healthcare facility from 95 minutes in 2010 and 47 minutes in 2020 toward a 30-minute target.

Sand Technologies plans to extend the Rural Health Operating System model to at least six additional African countries by the end of 2025 and to more than twenty by 2030. However, all performance figures reported to date originate from the implementer and the Ministry of Health, and no independent academic evaluation of health-outcome improvements has yet been published for this system, which launched in April 2025.