Hospital technology is being accused of racism. We can credit the highly credible Washington Post blog site and other very smart individuals for this very insightful information.
Artificial intelligence experts have been warning for years that bias in automation could cause unintentional harm in the future. But it’s also happening with technology that’s being used right now. In a recent paper published in Science, researchers lay out how a common algorithm used in hospitals to assess whether a patient needs extra care was making significantly biased recommendations.
According to researchers, the algorithm was disproportionately suggesting more white patients for a continued care program than black patients, even when black patients were sicker. Only 17.7% of black patients were getting additional care, when 46.5% of them should have been, the report found. The algorithm is used across health systems and is estimated to impact about 100 million people around the country, according to both STAT and the Washington Post.
The bias appears to stem from how the system, which the Washington Post identifies as being made by the health services company Optum, quantifies what it means to be sick. Rather than using illness or biological data, the algorithm uses cost and insurance claim information to understand how healthy a person is. The more dollars spent, the logic goes, the sicker a person is. The data revealed that less was being spent on black patients in part because they were receiving less care. Notably, the study points, algorithms based on cost are widely used in health care.
Here’s the problem. Artificial intelligence and the algorithms that drive this sort of technology are driven by logic and not emotion.
Perhaps the technology has evolved to a point where it realizes that blacks as a group are a burden on society.
But what are all these people going to do about this? Do they really think they can shut down the development of AI technologies at this point? The genie is already out of the bottle. Logic dictates that different races behave differently and AI systems are going to recognize these differences.
