Healthcare inequities and disparities in care are pervasive across socioeconomic, racial and gender divides.
AI is already helping to streamline care delivery, enable personalized medicine at scale, and support breakthrough discoveries.
Inherent bias in the data, algorithms, and users could worsen the problem.
Those who develop and deploy AI-driven healthcare solutions must be careful to prevent AI from unintentionally widening existing gaps.
AI can help ensure inclusiveness, reduce harm, and optimize outcomes by analyzing population data and flagging disproportional representation or gaps in demographic coverage.
AI can help root out implicit bias and suggest care pathways that may have previously been overlooked.
AI can forecast health risks for underserved populations and enable personalized risk assessments to better target interventions.
AI has incredible potential to accelerate workflows behind the scenes to reduce disparities, making care more affordable and accessible.
We must integrate all of this data so that key pieces are included, regardless of formatting or source.
AI practitioners have a responsibility to conduct bias audits, build diversity assessments into our AI development process, and understand how the model makes decisions.
Organizations must work together to set standards and frameworks for data exchange and acuity to guard against bias, which can help democratize access to complete, accurate patient data.