How to Understand and Fix Bias in Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Health Tools

Medical tools enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) can greatly improve health care by helping with problem-solving, automating tasks, and identifying patterns. AI can aid in diagnoses, predict patients' risk of developing certain illnesses, and help determine the communities most in need of preventative care. But AI products can also replicate--and worse, exacerbate--existing biases and disparities in patients' care and health outcomes. Alleviating these biases requires first understanding where they come from. Christina Silcox, Ph.D., research director for digital health at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, and her team identified four sources of AI bias and ways to mitigate them in a recent report funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. She spoke with Pew about the findings.