UnitedHealth Group used technology that may have kept sick black patients from receiving high-quality care. New York's state departments of financial services and health sent a letter to UnitedHealth Group over its use of an algorithm that researchers found to be racially biased. Per the Wall Street Journal, the missive is an initial step into a larger investigation. The algorithm in question, Impact Pro, identifies which patients would benefit from complex health procedures favored treating white patients than sicker black ones between 2013 and 2015, according to a study published in the prestigious journal Science. New York lawmakers deemed the use of this discriminatory technology "unlawful," and asked to either demonstrate the algorithm is not biased or to stop using Impact Pro immediately.

A study has highlighted the risks inherent in using historical data to train machine-learning algorithms to make predictions. The news: An algorithm that many US health providers use to predict which patients will most need extra medical care privileged white patients over black patients, according to researchers at UC Berkeley, whose study was published in Science. Effectively, it bumped whites up the queue for special treatments for complex conditions like kidney problems or diabetes. The study: The researchers dug through almost 50,000 records from a large, undisclosed academic hospital. They found that white patients were given higher risk scores, and were therefore more likely to be selected for extra care (like more nursing or dedicated appointments), than black patients who were in fact equally sick.

While at King Edward Medical University (KEMU), one of my responsibilities was giving a series of lectures on cardiac surgery to the final year MBBS class every year. Cardiac surgery is not an examination subject so attendance in my lectures was rather thin and the atmosphere a bit relaxed. In my first lecture to the new class, I often started off with asking students three questions not related to cardiac surgery. The first question was about Pakistan history. The question was, who was the second prime minister of Pakistan, and who was the second governor general of Pakistan.

Scholar argues that FDA should reform its regulation of algorithm-based medicine. In emergency situations, doctors have little time to save the lives of trauma patients. Gunshot wounds, car crashes, and other life-threatening harms often cause severe blood loss, which is the leading cause of preventable death when trauma puts patients' lives on the line. To manage the demands of these emergency cases, physicians today complement their medical skill-set with a new tool: algorithms. But in a recent paper, a legal scholar argues that federal regulatory reforms must occur to unleash the full lifesaving potential of algorithms in health care.