Posted by:  Adam Turteltaub

As the business world embraces Artificial Intelligence (AI) it’s important for compliance teams to understand what this technology is and what risks is can bring.  In this podcast and at the 2022 HCCA Compliance Institute oversight considerations for ethical AI are addressed by Shawn E. Marchese, Global Head of Compliance; Nakis Urfi, Product Compliance Officer; and Dr. Keith Grimes, Clinical Digital Health & Innovation Director all at Babylon Health.

At its root, they explain, AI is about automating tasks that would otherwise require human brain.  This means activities such as pattern recognition and even decision making.

The role of AI in healthcare is increasing because there aren’t enough people to fill all the positions.  It is already used for predicting which groups are at higher risks and for monitoring changes in X-rays.  And, if you have ever encountered a chat bot, that’s AI in practice.

Over time they anticipate AI being used in more places to optimize healthcare delivery, summarizing notes and as decision support for prescribing.  It can also, potentially, minimize the risk of false positives and even be used to track regulatory changes.

But, with AI come several concerns.  If unsupervised it can make decisions that can’t be controlled and have unintended consequences.  Bias is also a persistent problem, especially if the data is not representative of the population.  There have already been several examples of discriminatory behavior in hiring, loans, and facial recognition.  The AI team needs to take steps to ensure that it is feeding the AI accurate data and correcting for biases.

So what should the compliance team do?  Stay on top of the AI use in your organization.  Make sure that it is producing accurate results and ensure that there are safeguards in place with human oversight.  Be sure to address the privacy, security and safety concerns to avoid losing trust and damaging your organization’s reputation, not to mention some potentially large settlements.

Make sure, also, that there is ethical oversight that is cross functional.  There should be a process for raising and reviewing ethical issues, which can come up with some frequency.

Listen in to learn more, and then plan on attending their session at the 2022 HCCA Compliance Institute.