Using AI in healthcare comes with a lot of promise - but access to data, lack of clarity about who will pay for these tools and the challenge of creating algorithms without bias are holding us back.

In 2023, TIME named Dr. Ziad Obermeyer one of the 100 most influential people working in AI. As a professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and the co-founder of a non-profit and a startup in the AI healthcare space, his work centers on how to leverage AI to improve health and avoid racial bias.

We discuss:

• The idea of a safe harbor for companies to discuss and resolve AI challenges
• How his company Dandelion Health is helping solve the data log jam for AI product testing
• Why academics need to spend time “on the shop floor”
• The simple framework for avoiding AI bias he shared in his recent testimony to the Senate Finance Committee

Ziad says without access to the right data, AI systems can’t offer equitable solutions: 

“I think data is the biggest bottleneck to these things, and that bottleneck is even more binding in less well-resourced hospitals… When we look around and we see, ‘well, there are all these health algorithms that are in medical journals and people are publishing about them’. The majority of those things come from Palo Alto, Rochester, Minnesota [and] Boston. And, those patients are wonderful and they deserve to have algorithms trained on them and learning about them, but they are not representative of the rest of the country – let alone the rest of the world. And so, we have these huge disparities in the data from which algorithms are learning. And then those mirror the disparities and where algorithms can be applied.”

Relevant Links

Dr. Obermeyer’s profile at UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Ziad Obermeyer’s testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on how AI can help healthcare

More about Nightingale Open Science

More about Dandelion Health

Article on dissecting racial bias in algorithms

Article On the Inequity of Predicting A While Hoping for B. AER: P&P 2021 (with Sendhil Mullainathan)

About Our Guest

Dr. Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at UC Berkeley School of Public Health. His research uses machine learning to help doctors make better decisions, and help researchers make new discoveries—by ‘seeing’ the world the way algorithms do. His work on algorithmic racial bias has impacted how many organizations build and use algorithms, and how lawmakers and regulators hold AI accountable. He is a cofounder of Nightingale Open Science and Dandelion Health, a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and he continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved communities.

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