Sign up to save tools and stay up to date with the latest in AI
bg
bg
1

Overcoming AI’s Risk To Health Equity

Jan 09, 2025 - forbes.com
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into healthcare, particularly in identifying social determinants of health (SDOH) from clinician notes. While AI models like those used at Mass General Brigham have shown promise in identifying patients needing additional support, challenges remain. AI's potential for errors, such as "hallucinations" due to inadequate or biased training data, poses significant risks, especially in critical fields like healthcare. Ensuring accurate AI outputs requires high-quality, comprehensive data, which is often lacking when relying solely on patient-supplied information.

To effectively address health equity, AI models must incorporate diverse datasets beyond traditional healthcare data, including socioeconomic factors from public and private sources. This approach can help identify barriers like transportation access that impact healthcare outcomes. However, healthcare organizations must implement AI cautiously to avoid exacerbating health disparities. Ensuring AI's effectiveness involves using complete datasets and validating AI results through additional methods like surveys. As AI adoption grows, critical evaluation and a measured approach are essential to minimize errors and maximize benefits.

Key takeaways:

```html
  • Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being applied in healthcare, particularly in identifying social determinants of health (SDOH) from clinician's notes.
  • AI in healthcare faces challenges such as producing "hallucinations" due to inadequate or biased training data, which can lead to serious risks in medical diagnoses.
  • Effective AI requires accurate and complete training data, and relying solely on patient-supplied information can result in flawed insights.
  • To address health equity, AI models need to incorporate nontraditional datasets from outside the healthcare industry, such as socioeconomic data, to better understand SDOH.
```
View Full Article

Comments (0)

Be the first to comment!