Concerted Effort to Define Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare is Sorely Needed

The following is a guest article by Amy Hester, PhD, RN, BC, FAAN, Chairwoman and CEO at HD Nursing The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) across a number of industries, particularly in healthcare, has shown both great promise as well as cause for alarm.  A perfect example of not only misusing AI, but also continuing to use a model to make decisions affecting individual care that can be error-prone involves a recent class-action lawsuit filed against one of the nation’s largest health plans and its subsidiary.  Both companies stand accused of illegally using an algorithm to deny rehabilitation care to seriously ill patients that they knew had a high error rate. A STAT investigation found that clinical employees were pressured to follow an algorithm that predicts a patient’s length of stay under the guise of denying payments to people in Medicare Advantage plans. Internal documents showed that a quota was in place to limit patient rehab stays to within 1% of the days projected by the algorithm.  In a nascent AI marketplace that resembles America’s wild-west frontier era, it’s no wonder that AI is now appearing brightly on the proverbial radar of government officials. The Biden Administration’s recent executive order on AI, which also instructs the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to establish a safety program to track unsafe healthcare practices involving this increasingly popular technology, has been heralded as a “landmark” actio...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: AI/Machine Learning C-Suite Leadership Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Regulations Artificial Intelligence Dr. Amy Hester Ethical AI HD Nursing Healthcare AI Healthcare Automation responsible AI Source Type: blogs