The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Healthcare Industry in Brunei Darussalam in 2025

Brunei's health system shows why AI matters: BruHealth 5.0 transforms a COVID-era tracker into an AI-powered, personalised health hub that nudges prevention, schedules screenings and even gamifies wellness (the playful “Oyen Challenge” lets users adopt a digital cat and earn rewards for healthy habits).

With AI analysing diet, sleep and stress to tailor recommendations and a Ministry Intelligence Hub for surveillance, Brunei demonstrates how smarter platforms can boost engagement, optimise scarce clinical resources and shift care from reactive to preventive - while also flagging equity risks like the digital divide and the need for human oversight.

Read the BruHealth 5.0 launch for feature details and rollout context via the EVYD report and consider practical workforce training - Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration teaches nontechnical teams how to use AI tools and write effective prompts so local health staff can apply AI responsibly in the day-to-day.

“Artificial Intelligence will soon transform this data into actionable insights, ensuring personalized care, efficient resource utilization, and better and more structured decision-making.”

Brunei's health system is small but highly organised: the Ministry of Health combines a clear leadership structure with specialised departments - from Healthcare Technology, which supports nationwide systems like Bru‑HIMS, to the Health Promotion Centre and a recently formed Epidemic Intelligence and Response Unit (EIRU) that, since 1 November 2023, acts like a public‑health command centre for surveillance and outbreak response; the National Health Screening Programme also links citizens into preventive care via the BruHealth app, while the Medical and Health Research Ethics Committee (MHREC) governs research ethics and no longer issues retrospective approvals.

This mix of policy, quality & accreditation, laboratory science (the Department of Scientific Services), and international collaboration (working closely with WHO in the region) means AI projects must plug into existing governance, data pipelines and community outreach if they want impact - think multilingual patient education and digital‑literacy tools to reach Malay, Chinese and other communities rather than assuming everyone is already online.

For a concise map of the Ministry's departments and how they support technology, visit the Brunei Ministry of Health departments overview, see the WHO Brunei Darussalam country page for regional context, or explore practical multilingual patient education examples from Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus and guides.

BruHealth 5.0 is the centrepiece of Brunei's AI-enabled health stack: built by the E‑Government National Centre with technical partnership from EVYD Technology, the platform moves beyond appointment booking to AI-driven prevention - a smarter Health Index that factors diet, sleep and stress, personalised routines and real‑time dashboards that nudge screening uptake for cervical, breast, colorectal and cardiovascular programs, plus gamified engagement like the Oyen Challenge where users earn Gems and care for a digital cat to build healthy habits; these features are described in the official BruHealth 5.0 launch write-up and reflected in app listings such as the BruHealth page on Google Play, which also notes widespread uptake and ongoing updates.

Together with national screening integration and population dashboards analysed by MOH systems, BruHealth demonstrates how an adaptive, learning health platform can combine AI recommendations with rewards, surveillance and service maps to make prevention more actionable for everyday users.

“Artificial Intelligence will soon transform this data into actionable insights, ensuring personalized care, efficient resource utilization, and better and more structured decision-making.”

Brunei's emerging AI playbook combines practical university policy with international best-practice guidance: Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) published a formal “Policy & Guidelines on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)” - framed as a beacon for educators and students - that foregrounds ethical use, transparency and data privacy and was even presented during Teachers' Day outreach in 2023 (UBD Teachers' Day 2023 Generative AI exhibition write-up); by 2025 UBD has embedded those rules into programmes, short courses and micro‑credentials so faculty, staff and public servants can learn responsible prompt engineering and tool oversight (UBD 2025 AI programmes and micro‑credentials overview).

For researchers and publishers working in Brunei's health sector, scholarly guidance such as the SRCD generative‑AI policy reinforces practical obligations - AI cannot be listed as an author, any use must be disclosed, outputs documented, and humans remain accountable for errors or bias (SRCD generative AI policy for researchers and publishers).

Put together, these documents form a pragmatic governance stack: institutional ethics and training at UBD, disclosure and accountability expectations for research, plus hands‑on upskilling so hospitals and public‑health teams can pilot AI with safeguards - an approach that nudges innovation forward without losing sight of patient privacy and fairness, and that grounds technical pilots in clear, locally endorsed rules (even royalty-level endorsement helped raise visibility when a copy of the GenAI book was signed for the Sultan).

“The future is always a lot closer than we think,” UBD Vice‑Chancellor Dr Hazri Haji Kifle said. “So it's imperative that we, as Brunei Darussalam's premier higher education institute, remain two steps ahead to anticipate how the world moves towards further digitalisation and especially in the ethical use of AI in various aspects of study and work.”

The new healthcare policy in Brunei centers on scaling BruHealth 5.0 from a COVID tracker into a national, AI‑enabled prevention and service platform that links policy, incentives and institutional capacity: the Ministry of Health has woven expanded National Health Screening Programs (now including cervical, breast, colorectal and cardiovascular screening) into the app, built a MOH Intelligence Hub and a Digital Health Unit for surveillance and coordination, and uses reward systems like the BruPoints mall to sustain behaviour change - one striking result: nearly 49,000 participants in the “BN on the Move” challenge collectively logged about 1 billion steps in eight days - showing how policy and gamified design can move population habits at scale.

Early uptake metrics reported in the World Economic Forum analysis demonstrate strong engagement (about 63% of residents logging in weekly, 566,403 users viewing lab results and 335,320 viewing imaging), while launch materials from EVYD underline the technical upgrades (AI‑powered Health Index, Personalized Routines, gamified Oyen Challenge) that make personalised prevention actionable.

The policy package pairs these technical advances with explicit safeguards - algorithmic transparency, human clinical oversight and targeted efforts to bridge the digital divide - so that AI augments preventive care without leaving vulnerable groups behind; for rollout detail see the WEF analysis of BruHealth and the official BruHealth 5.0 launch write‑up from EVYD Technology.

“Artificial Intelligence will soon transform this data into actionable insights, ensuring personalized care, efficient resource utilization, and better and more structured decision-making.”

Brunei's AI use-cases tie everyday prevention to measurable action: BruHealth 5.0 uses an AI-powered Health Index and Personalized Routines to nudge screening uptake, tailor tips on diet, sleep and stress, and layer gamified campaigns like the Oyen Challenge and BN on the Move to sustain habits; centralized dashboards and the MOH Intelligence Hub turn those individual signals into population-level insights for targeted outreach.

Practical results are striking - the World Economic Forum notes the ‘BN on the Move' steps challenge drew nearly 49,000 participants who helped the nation log 1 billion steps in eight days - while the official BruHealth 5.0 launch outlines expanded screening integration, smarter recommendations and a BN On the Move 2025 push after last year's 90 billion-step milestone.

These examples show how AI can shift care upstream (screening reminders, habit formation, risk stratification) while incentives and social features translate recommendations into real-world behaviour; see the World Economic Forum analysis and the BruHealth 5.0 launch for campaign and feature detail.

“Artificial Intelligence will soon transform this data into actionable insights, ensuring personalized care, efficient resource utilization, and better and more structured decision‑making.”

Brunei's AI-ready workforce is taking shape around Universiti Brunei Darussalam's School of Digital Science, which now runs the Bachelor of Digital Science with majors in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics and an Applied Artificial Intelligence stream that produced its first cohort on August 13, 2025; the curriculum pairs laboratory practice at the Intelligent Systems Lab with online industry content and certifications from providers like IBM and Google to create job-ready graduates, and students even demonstrated large language models on a NAO robot to the Sultan during Teachers' Day - an image that sticks because it shows classroom projects moving straight into national showcases.

UBD's push supports the nation's Digital Economy Masterplan 2025, adds a new Master of Digital Public Health (the programme's launch signals a regional first in digital public‑health training), and is reinforced by short courses, micro‑credentials and industry ties that bring biomedical and diagnostics partners into campus projects - see the UBD Bachelor of Digital Science programme details and the UBD AI and Innovation programmes summary and news article for programme and partnership context.

Together these academic pathways, lab experiences and certification tracks create the practical, ethical and technical skills that health systems need to pilot AI safely and scale local talent into roles spanning data engineering, model oversight and digital public‑health practice.

Brunei's approach to technical, ethical and governance practices for health AI is pragmatic and principle‑driven: the country published voluntary AI guidelines that crystallise seven core principles - transparency & explainability, security & safety, fairness & equity, and data protection & governance - so models used in hospitals and apps like BruHealth must be auditable and interpretable for clinicians and patients alike (see Brunei's Voluntary AI Guidelines).

That soft‑law foundation is reinforced by concrete moves: an AI Governance and Ethics Working Group convened by AITI in May 2024 brought together 25 government, industry and academic representatives to draft national guidance, while the Personal Data Protection Order (PDPO) 2025 gives individuals clearer control over how private‑sector organisations collect, use and disclose health data - critical for training safe clinical models (details on the PDPO and evolving national AI playbook).

Together with ASEAN's regional principles on fairness, accountability and human‑centricity, these layers create a workable governance stack that favours pilot‑first, human‑in‑the‑loop deployments, explicit disclosure of AI use in research and care, and targeted data‑governance practices to protect vulnerable groups; one vivid test is whether model explanations can be made simple enough for a nurse at a community clinic to trust a risk score without a PhD, because that human‑machine trust is the true litmus for responsible rollout.

Beginners in Brunei's health sector can follow a clear, low‑risk pathway: start by grounding clinical teams in short, practical classes (for example, the AI Fundamentals for Healthcare micro‑course offers a focused, 5‑hour primer) to learn core concepts, ethics and basic prompting before moving to longer certificates that teach hands‑on machine learning and NLP - see the eCornell AI in Healthcare Certificate (project-based supervised learning pathway) for a project‑based pathway into supervised learning and data preparation; next, prototype with very small, well‑scoped pilots that reuse labelled data (a supervised‑learning approach described in the BytePlus overview works well for diagnostic or screening tasks) and deploy safely on managed platforms - explore the BytePlus ModelArk LLM model deployment platform to experiment with private or managed environments and token‑based scaling; finally, pair technical pilots with community work (multilingual patient education and digital‑literacy support) and simple evaluation plans so a first pilot proves value without swallowing budget - think of a tiny model that quietly flags patients for follow‑up and feels like an

early‑warning ping

in a busy clinic, not a finished product.

Together these steps - learn, certify, pilot, partner - make AI approachable and practical for Brunei's health teams while keeping safety and equity front and centre.

Brunei's BruHealth story shows a clear, practical path forward: AI-driven prevention and precision public health that boosts engagement while demanding strong governance, human oversight and workforce training - after all, nearly 49,000 citizens in the BN on the Move challenge logged about 1 billion steps in eight days, a vivid proof that design plus incentives can change population habits (see the World Economic Forum's BruHealth analysis).

The next phase will likely pair GPT-style assistants and predictive models with Bru‑HIMS data to speed triage, personalise care plans and support telemedicine, but success hinges on privacy, explainability and people - BytePlus's overview of AI in Brunei highlights PDPO updates, AITI's governance work and the need for clinician-in-the-loop deployments.

For health teams and managers aiming to turn pilot wins into sustainable systems, practical upskilling matters: short courses and bootcamps can bridge the gap between strategy and practice - Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work bootcamp teaches nontechnical staff how to use AI tools and write effective prompts so local teams can deploy AI safely and pragmatically.

With measured policy, inclusive design and investment in skills, Brunei can scale BruHealth's learning-health model into equitable, AI-augmented care for 2025 and beyond.