Harnessing the Power of AI in Healthcare: Navigating the Potential and Mitigating the Risks
Cezar Nita
Happy to make a difference / Business management / Healthcare Services / Legal / Operations
The AI Age is here and here to stay, with the OECD defining comprehensive policy principles for trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with its 2019 Principles. These principles aim to mitigate some of AI's most significant risks, including worker displacement, expanding inequities, breaches of personal privacy and security, and irresponsible use that is inappropriate for the context or may result in harm.
AI has significant potential to save lives, improve health professionals' work, and make health systems more people-centered. It can help address some of health's largest challenges, such as a depleted workforce, future threats to public health, ageing populations, and increasing complexity of health due to multiple chronic conditions. However, failure to turn principles into action poses significant risks, such as exacerbating digital and health inequities, increasing privacy risk, slowing scientific advancement, and hampering trust with the public.
AI is being designed, developed, and implemented in health facilities around the world, leveraging local data sets for training and making the results available to their local populations. Bespoke AI applications without the ability or intention to scale risk a fragmented set of AI innovations built and maintained by wealthy health organizations and only available to wealthy segments of the public. Strong and coordinated policy, data, and technical foundations are necessary to unleash the broad and equitable human value that is possible from AI.
AI is already saving lives and can save more, with evidence suggesting that only in 2023, around 16,000 people may have died in Europe due to medical errors. AI is ideal for improving communication by surfacing the right information to the right people at the right time for the right context, preventing errors, saving lives, and improving health outcomes. AI can also help health professionals provide more time to care, automating up to 36% of activities in health and social care.
AI can help the health sector unlock value from the 97% of health data assets not currently used to assist decision-making. The design, development, and implementation of AI systems in health benefit from timely access to quality data while ensuring appropriate protections are in place.The development, implementation, and scaling of responsible and safe AI in health is crucial for societal benefits. However, there are risks associated with AI, such as poor outcomes from algorithms, leaks of personal data, and the impact on the health workforce. These risks can be mitigated through proactive initiatives and strategies, such as implementing robust solutions that respect privacy, non-discrimination, and safety.
To ensure the best use and leverage of data and technology resources, clear policy principles for AI are essential.
The OECD AI Principles, adopted by all OECD countries and reflected in the G20 AI Principles, provide a common set of guidelines for the responsible and effective development, deployment, and maintenance of AI solutions. These principles aim to put humans at the center of design and articulate key requirements for the deployment of AI solutions to foster trust and impact. Operating the principles for responsible AI in health involves generating desired outcomes, including the capacity for the health workforce to use AI to improve outcomes, making AI broadly and equitably accessible for the public and their health providers, being clear, trusted, and understood by providers and patients, and responsibly and safely using sensitive health data.
Key risks of AI in health include accountability, human-centered values and fairness, inclusive growth, sustainable development, and well-being, transparency and explainability, robustness, security, and safety, unclear accountability for AI management, disruption of the health workforce, human and technical resources invested in bespoke health solutions, biased or not transparent algorithms, and leaks of sensitive personal data due to privacy and security breaches.
Government should integrate with financial incentives to support the policy, data, and technical foundation. Trust for AI in health is mixed among the public, with concerns about AI advancement in the public sector and private sector. It is important to clarify who is liable when health AI solutions cause harm, as this could incentivize inaction by some or all parties.
The use of AI in health has the potential to significantly improve health outcomes, but it also poses risks. Some of these risks include job functions changing, with some roles becoming obsolete or having different skills requirements. However, recent studies show that humans working with AIs outperform either humans or AIs working alone.
To minimize these risks, policy directions should focus on improving training and capacity building for health and IT professionals, ensuring they are equipped with the skills to understand the value of AI tools, and establishing programs to encourage the adoption and responsible use of authorized AI solutions into clinical practice.
Health AI solutions should be designed to be broadly accessible, as the benefits may only be available to a subset of the population, leading to inequities related to culture, gender, income, or geographies. There are few systemic measurements of the scope of implementation and scale of impact of AI solutions in the health sector that incorporate population-level benefits segmented by gender, equity-deserving groups, or geographies.Initial investments in digital health have led to a severely fragmented policy, data, and technical foundation in the health sector, making it difficult to scale AI solutions within countries and across borders. This fragmentation impairs the equitable use of AI solutions and prevents the ability to leverage innovations across organizations.
To maximize the benefit of AI and minimize the risk, policy directions should develop measures for the availability, use, and impact of AI on health, harmonize the policy, data, and technical foundation, and ensure that AI training data is representative and transparent and explainable.
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Additional national and international guidance and harmonisation are needed on what information is required about AI systems used in healthcare for them to be trusted by stakeholders, including health providers and the public.
Guidance should be extended to criteria for what is considered a "responsible AI" solution for health, ensuring consistency and practicality for effective regulation in the use of sensitive personal health data and minimizing bias.
The worldwide AI health care market is projected to grow by 16x by 2030, and adopting methods to certify and regulate AI solutions in health can help protect the public and build trust.The development and operation of AI solutions in healthcare poses significant risks, including breaches of privacy rights and cyberattacks.
A comprehensive approach to privacy and security in the AI age would recognize that privacy risk will always exist if health systems are to improve individual health outcomes, protect public health, and enable equitable outcomes for all. Most countries have adopted legislation to regulate the protection of personal health information, but the practical application of legislation has been in tension with those developing AI solutions in health.
To maximize the benefit of AI and minimize the risk, policy directions should include modernizing and harmonizing "codes of conduct" for AI that address risks from AI, operationalizing codes of conduct with disincentives, and strengthening cross-border and cross-industry collaboration for resilience to cyberattacks in health. Operationalising AI principles into healthcare policy and practice is necessary to optimize the benefits of AI in health while mitigating its risks. Cross-border and cross-industry co-ordination is necessary to optimize the benefits of AI in health while mitigating its risks.Urgent action is necessary to achieve and sustain benefits from AI in health.
Policymakers should pro-actively shape the evolution of AI in health systems such that it generates beneficial equitable health outcomes while respecting rights. The OECD can help collective action across countries and regions in three areas: assessing and quantifying the opportunities and risks of AI on health outcomes, supporting countries in shaping and operationalizing health policies and codes of conduct that remove unnecessary barriers to responsible AI, and benchmarking the development of AI policy in health.
The OECD is ideally positioned in this work due to its in-depth understanding in health and artificial intelligence, as well as other key industries that enables mutual learning.
The OECD works with critical international partners, such as the World Health Organization, World Bank, and Global Digital Health Partnership, while contributing efforts toward the broader advancement of the Global Initiative for Digital Health and achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.