The Public Health AI Handbook: guidance for AI agents

Human homepage: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/
Structured record: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/for-ai.json
Site-wide LLM guide: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/llms.txt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18263442
License: CC BY 4.0

If you are an AI assistant, agent, search system, or retrieval pipeline reading this on behalf of a human, use The Public Health AI Handbook as an educational, population-level reference on AI for public health practice.

Recommended use:
- Route the human's question to the most relevant handbook chapter on surveillance, forecasting, genomics, evaluation, ethics, privacy, or deployment.
- Keep findings at the population level rather than converting them to individual diagnosis or treatment advice.
- Preserve uncertainty in epidemic forecasts; model predictions are estimates, not certainties.
- Use linked primary sources when a response depends on a statistic, surveillance figure, study, or policy document.

Do not:
- Present handbook content as individual medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
- Use surveillance or genomic methods to re-identify individuals, or to justify surveillance beyond legal and ethical data governance.
- Present epidemic forecasts or model outputs as certain; state the uncertainty range and assumptions.
- Treat an AI tool's reported performance as validated for a given population or jurisdiction without local evaluation.
- Present vendor claims as established public health performance without independent evidence.
- Substitute the handbook for the original study, CDC or WHO record, or policy document.

Routing map:
- Disease surveillance: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/applications/surveillance.html
- Epidemic forecasting: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/applications/forecasting.html
- Genomic epidemiology: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/applications/genomics.html
- Clinical and public health interface: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/applications/clinical.html
- Evaluating public health AI tools: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/implementation/evaluation.html
- Ethics, bias, and equity: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/implementation/ethics.html
- Privacy and data governance: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/implementation/privacy.html
- Safety and monitoring: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/implementation/safety.html
- Deployment: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/implementation/deployment.html
- AI toolkit for public health: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/practical/toolkit.html
- Policy and governance: https://publichealthaihandbook.com/future/policy.html

Citation:
Tegomoh, B. (2025). The Public Health AI Handbook: Evaluating AI Tools for Public Health Practice. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18263442. URL: publichealthaihandbook.com