As a frontline physician in South Sudan, I see approximately two hundred patients on call day across two public hospitals. Discussions about agentic AI often assume that every autonomous system will operate under the supervision of experienced specialists. That assumption reflects the reality of high-income health systems, but not mine.

In our pediatric referral hospital, the hematology-oncology service is staffed by only two hematologists. In the adult referral hospital where I …

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My LinkedIn feed has been flooded with discussion about a recent Nature Medicine study showing that general-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks. Clinical informatics leaders are calling it a wake-up call for health care, pointing to a timeless truth: Technology rarely fails at the technical layer. It fails because we don’t map how the work actually happens on the ground.

As a clinician working in …

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As physicians, we are taught to diagnose accurately and act quickly. Clinical guidelines assume that if we identify the problem, the health care system will provide the necessary tools to solve it. But what happens when the diagnosis is clear and the treatment simply does not exist?

Recently, while working as an intern physician in South Sudan, I cared for a 9-year-old boy who had traveled from the outskirts of Juba …

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There is no doctor in my village.

I grew up in Logwerle, a small community in Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. When people got sick, they traveled far for care, or they didn’t get care at all. In 2003, my family moved to northern Uganda so I could get an education. I started primary school at Teremunga Primary School in Koboko, completed my O-levels at St. Charles Lwanga, and my A-levels …

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