Rooting Out Racial Bias in Health Care AI
A SPECIAL SERIES
About the Series
There’s growing excitement that artificial intelligence can make health care better by speeding up care, improving diagnoses and easing the burden on a burned out workforce. But there are also concerns that these powerful new tools will perpetuate biases and inequities long baked into our health care system.
In this special three-part series, Reporter/Producer Ryan Levi and Dan Gorenstein talk with machine learning experts, clinicians, researchers and government officials to unpack why hospitals are excited about AI, why it’s so hard to root out bias, and how hospitals and federal regulators are trying to keep biased algorithms from getting to the bedside.
Part One
In Part 1, we explore the challenge of diagnosing bias in AI and what one health system is trying to do about it.
Part Two
In Part 2, we dig into what the Biden administration is doing to keep biased algorithms from getting to the bedside.
Tradeoffs LIVE!
We recorded a lively conversation between a top federal health official and a health care executive about how they must work together to keep AI from exacerbating racial bias in health care.
Talking with the Regulators and Industry Leaders
Algorithm developers, health systems and government regulators can all agree that racial bias should be kept out of clinical AI tools as much as possible. But what will it take to make that a reality? And how can regulators and those they regulate work together to reach this goal? In December 2023, Dan Gorenstein moderated three one-on-one discussions featuring industry leaders and top officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and HHS’ Office for Civil Rights digging into these questions. The conversations happened onstage at the ONC Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Watch all three sessions below to see regulators and those they regulate come together to address racial bias in health care AI.
Tradeoffs’ coverage of diagnostic excellence is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.