Artificial intelligence – especially machine learning – is helping to drive progress and innovation throughout the health technology industry. 

But at the same time, it's clear that AI can also recreate and exacerbate biases, potentially worsening health disparities and even putting patients' lives at risk.

In a HIMSS21 Global Conference Digital Session scheduled to air on Monday, August 9, Mayo Clinic Platform President Dr. John Halamka will speak with HIMSS Executive Vice President of Media Georgia Galanoudis about evaluating algorithms' fitness for purpose – and whether it's possible to maintain the promise of AI, knowing about its potential downsides.  

Although AI-related optimism is justified, Halamka says, issues around equity and bias replication – and algorithm quality in general – are going to be present whenever there are mass quantities of training data.  

But the industry doesn't generally publish statistics describing how an algorithm was developed, or how it can best be used. So what is to be done? How can stakeholders – and patients – have confidence in the data?  

In this session, Halamka will describe how equipping users with vital knowledge about the creation of an algorithm will empower them to best use AI tools.  

A perfect storm for innovation, he says, springs from three things: urgency, policy and industry. And that is exactly the case for what's happening in AI with regard to bias and transparency.

At the same time, the technology to simply publish the bias of an algorithm, or to simply describe the data used, doesn't yet exist.

In their session, Halamka and Galanoudis will explore how that technology may develop – and how to maintain momentum around AI while addressing the problems inherent to machine learning.

Halamka's discussion will be part of an afternoon-long HIMSS21 Digital session, "The Year That Shook the World." It's scheduled to air on Monday, August 9, from 1 to 3:15 p.m. Read more about the HIMSS21 Digital program here.

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Twitter: @kjercich
Email: kjercich@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.