Health Care Algorithms Can Improve or Worsen Racial and Ethnic Disparities

“In recent years, artificial intelligence has reached many parts of health care, and other health care algorithms are now part of everyday practice in clinical care, resource allocations, and health care management.

Diagnostic and predictive algorithms have become popular because they enable automation of common tasks and provide insight for difficult decisions. But many algorithms use race and ethnicity as input variables, raising concerns about their true predictive and diagnostic potentials.

At the request of the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ), Senior Fellows Shazia Mehmood Siddique, Jaya Aysola, Michael O. Harhay, Harald Schmidt, Gary E. Weissman, and colleagues examined the impacts of health care algorithms on racial and ethnic disparities.”

Read more at PennLDI.