Responsible Health AI Readiness and Maturity Index (RHAMI): Healthcare Systems’ Novel Automated Optimization of Responsible Scaled AI Outcomes and ROI Applied to a Global Narrative Review of Leading AI Uses Cases in Public Health Nutrition

Poor diet is the leading preventable risk factor for death worldwide, associated with over 10 million premature deaths and $8 trillion related costs every year. Artificial intelligence or AI is rapidly emerging as the most historically disruptive, innovatively dynamic, rapidly scaled, cost efficient, and economically productive technology (that is increasingly providing transformative countermeasures to these negative health trends, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and underserved communities which bear the greatest burden from them). Yet widespread confusion persists among healthcare systems and policymakers on how to best identify, integrate, and evolve the safe, trusted, effective, affordable, and equitable AI solutions right for their communities, especially in public health nutrition. We therefore provide here the first known global, comprehensive, and actionable narrative review of the state-of-the-art of AI-accelerated nutrition assessment and healthy eating for healthcare systems, generated by the first automated end-to-end empirical index for responsible health AI readiness and maturity: the Responsible Health AI readiness and Maturity Index (RHAMI). The index, analysis, and review are built by a multi-national team spanning the Global North and South, consisting of front-line clinicians, ethicists, engineers, executives, administrators, public health practitioners, and policymakers. RHAMI analysis identified top performing healthcare systems and their nutrition AI, along with leading use cases including multimodal edge AI nutrition assessments as ambient intelligence, strategic scaling of practical embedded precision nutrition platforms, and sovereign swarm agentic AI social networks for sustainable healthy diets. This index-based review is meant to facilitate standardized, continuous, automated, and real-time multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional strategic planning, implementation, and optimization of AI capabilities and functionalities worldwide, aligned with healthcare systems’ strategic objectives, practical constraints, and local cultural values. The ultimate strategic objectives of RHAMI starting in AI-accelerated public health nutrition are to improve population health, financial efficiency, and societal equity through a global cooperation of the public and private sectors stretching across the Global North and South.