Aditya Rastogi

África Periáñez, Ana Fernández del Río, Ivan Nazarov et al.

Mobile health has the potential to revolutionize health care delivery and patient engagement. In this work, we discuss how integrating Artificial Intelligence into digital health applications-focused on supply chain, patient management, and capacity building, among other use cases-can improve the health system and public health performance. We present an Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning platform that allows the delivery of adaptive interventions whose impact can be optimized through experimentation and real-time monitoring. The system can integrate multiple data sources and digital health applications. The flexibility of this platform to connect to various mobile health applications and digital devices and send personalized recommendations based on past data and predictions can significantly improve the impact of digital tools on health system outcomes. The potential for resource-poor settings, where the impact of this approach on health outcomes could be more decisive, is discussed specifically. This framework is, however, similarly applicable to improving efficiency in health systems where scarcity is not an issue.

Ana Fernández del Río, Michael Brennan Leong, Paulo Saraiva et al.

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning (RL) platform that enhances end-to-end user journeys in healthcare digital tools through personalization. We explore a case study with SwipeRx, the most popular all-in-one app for pharmacists in Southeast Asia, demonstrating how the platform can be used to personalize and adapt user experiences. Our RL framework is tested through a series of experiments with product recommendations tailored to each pharmacy based on real-time information on their purchasing history and in-app engagement, showing a significant increase in basket size. By integrating adaptive interventions into existing mobile health solutions and enriching user journeys, our platform offers a scalable solution to improve pharmaceutical supply chain management, health worker capacity building, and clinical decision and patient care, ultimately contributing to better healthcare outcomes.

África Periáñez, Kathrin Schmitz, Lazola Makhupula et al.

By providing evidence-based clinical decision support, digital tools and electronic health records can revolutionize patient management, especially in resource-poor settings where fewer health workers are available and often need more training. When these tools are integrated with AI, they can offer personalized support and adaptive interventions, effectively connecting community health workers (CHWs) and healthcare facilities. The CHARM (Community Health Access & Resource Management) app is an AI-native mobile app for CHWs. Developed through a joint partnership of Causal Foundry (CF) and mothers2mothers (m2m), CHARM empowers CHWs, mainly local women, by streamlining case management, enhancing learning, and improving communication. This paper details CHARM's development, integration, and upcoming reinforcement learning-based adaptive interventions, all aimed at enhancing health worker engagement, efficiency, and patient outcomes, thereby enhancing CHWs' capabilities and community health.

Jiamin Xu, Ivan Nazarov, Aditya Rastogi et al.

This paper addresses the poor finite-horizon performance of existing online \emph{restless bandit} (RB) algorithms, which stems from the prohibitive sample complexity of learning a full \emph{Markov decision process} (MDP) for each agent. We argue that superior finite-horizon performance requires \emph{rapid convergence} to a \emph{high-quality} policy. Thus motivated, we introduce a reformulation of online RBs as a \emph{budgeted thresholding contextual bandit}, which simplifies the learning problem by encoding long-term state transitions into a scalar reward. We prove the first non-asymptotic optimality of an oracle policy for a simplified finite-horizon setting. We propose a practical learning policy under a heterogeneous-agent, multi-state setting, and show that it achieves a sublinear regret, achieving \emph{faster convergence} than existing methods. This directly translates to higher cumulative reward, as empirically validated by significant gains over state-of-the-art algorithms in large-scale heterogeneous environments. Our work provides a new pathway for achieving practical, sample-efficient learning in finite-horizon RBs.