Weekly Overseas Health IT Links –10th September, 2022.

This article is adapted fromVoices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made,out Sept. 8 from Russell Sage Foundation Press.In May 2021, I got a call I never expected. I was working on abook about A.I. ethics, focused on the algorithm that gives out kidneys to transplant patients in the United States. Darren Stewart —a data scientist from UNOS, the nonprofit that runs the kidney allocation process—was calling to get my take: How many decimal places should they include when calculating each patient’s allocation score? The score is an incredibly important number, given it determines which patient will get f irst chance at each donated organ. But still: decimal places? Surely, I thought, this was a technical detail—a question for the experts.I quickly discovered that I was wrong. The issue was ethical rather than technical, and fascinating: The computers at UNOS could calculate each patient ’s allocation score out to 16 decimal places. And in some cases, for patients in very similar situations, the system would need to carry things out to the umpteenth decimal place in order to find a difference between two transplant patients and offer an available organ to one rather than the other .Given how high the stakes are, why not use all the data you can and be as precise as possible? To Stewart and his colleagues, that approach felt wrong. Past a certain point, these extra digits of precision get so small that they stop describing real medi...

Source: Australian Health Information Technology - September 10, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David G More MB PhD Source Type: blogs