If you were to find out that the AI/ML system was used to make recommendations on your care and no one told you, how would you feel? Well, come to think of it, do you know whether an AI/ML system was used the last time you saw a physician?

Week 6 Discussion

Reply to the following using at least 175 words per reply. Be constructive and professional in your reply. Be sure to use FULL APA references and in-text citations.

1. The ethical questions of Informed Consent are far reaching, more than I ever thought.

To review, one of the 4 goals of AI in healthcare is Informed Consent, here is the list again:

Informed consent to use data
Safety and Transparency
Algorithmic fairness and biases
Data Privacy

I found this FANTASTIC article (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3529576) that runs through a scenario of a patient speaking with his physician and the recommended course of treatment for his diagnosis. Please take just 5 minutes to read this. The article brings up a host of ethical questions about informed consent and asks some very hard to answer questions.

The last question is very poignant, “If you were to find out that the AI/ML system was used to make recommendations on your care and no one told you, how would you feel? Well, come to think of it, do you know whether an AI/ML system was used the last time you saw a physician?”

How would you feel?

2. Cloud is a fancy term for “someone else’s computer”. Rather than running application servers and storing data on premises, it is transmitted across a secure Internet connection to the cloud location. This model is becoming very popular, it saves the practice/organization from purchasing expensive computers/servers and hiring expensive IT staff who would normally perform the maintenance and support of the servers running the applications and storing the data.

There are many different types of applications that can be offered up from the cloud to a practice/organization, from EHR applications to organizations who analyze large sums of data to support their AI and decision support models.

Our learning activities, “How does IBM Watson work?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7E1TJ1HtM0) and “Watson Health for Diabetes Management” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFD8HFqNR18) describe how wearables, data management and analytics in the Watson Health Cloud. IBM is then able to make predictive analytics for a give patient and sends information/recommendations to the patient’s smartphone. IBM claims they can predict if a patient is on their way to experiencing a diabetic event and send the patient information and recommendations to avoid the predicted event.

I don’t think this is replacing healthcare practitioners, but what are your thoughts on this type of predictive analysis using the cloud?