Putting Bioethics to Work on AI, Trust, and Health Care
Principal Investigator: Vardit Ravitsky, The Hastings Center
Co-principal Investigator: Gregory E. Kaebnick, The Hastings Center
Funder: The Donaghue Foundation
Start date: October 2024
At a time when artificial intelligence is changing the landscape of health care delivery and biomedical research, this five-year project seeks to advance bioethics research and related public engagement regarding how to integrate AI into health care in ways that promote—and deserve—trust. Among the questions to be addressed are: Will patients, health care providers, researchers, and the public trust new AI-based tools? And how should we design and implement AI to be trustworthy?
The project has three objectives:
- Conduct research into, advance scholarship on, and develop practical guidance pertaining to ethical issues that are crucial for the trustworthy employment of AI in health care.
One of the projects will look at how trust and trustworthiness are conceptualized in key guidelines, blueprints, and frameworks that have been produced by federal agencies, medical societies, or others that develop policies for the use of AI in health, health care, and biomedical science. The project will build on the National Academy of Medicine’s AI Code of Conduct, which seeks to ensure that AI in health and health care will be a reliable and trustworthy force.
- Employ multiple engagement approaches to disseminate the results of projects supported by this grant and amplify public discourse surrounding AI and trust in health.
These approaches include high-caliber webinars and other public events and conferences, issue briefs, and toolkits to help various professionals, such as health care and public health leaders, better communicate about AI and trust in health.
- Map the various areas of impact of bioethics work on AI, trust, and health and develop metrics for assessing the impact of scholarly and public engagement activities.
The Hastings Center will use public engagement activities, such as those described above, as case studies for impact-assessment. This work will contribute to a blueprint for assessing bioethics impact and will subsequently inform the design and implementation of future work at the Center and within the field of bioethics more broadly.