Discovery of racial bias in health care AI wins STAT Madness ‘Editors’ Pick’
The winner of the STAT Madness 'Editors' Pick' exemplifies a growing challenge in health care and biomedicine: separating hype from reality in terms of what artificial intelligence can do.
Although “garbage in, garbage out” has been a software truism for more than half a century, programmers can’t seem to avoid the first part — as researchers discovered when they investigated an algorithm widely used by hospitals to decide which patients get access to extra health care services. The artificial intelligence software equated health care spending with health, and it had a disturbing result: It routinely let healthier white patients into the programs ahead of black patients who were sicker and needed them more.
It was one of the clearest demonstrations yet that some, and perhaps many, of the algorithms that guide
