The importance of ethical AI in integrated care
By Alan Payne, Group Product and Engineering Director, The Access Group
As we know, AI is transforming health and care. It presents a significant opportunity to streamline decision-making, improve data analysis and insights, introduce more predictive healthcare, and ultimately reduce the friction felt between care settings.
However, its potential has to be balanced with ethical safeguards, including bias mitigation, transparency, and human oversight, to ensure the health and social care sector can secure these benefits while also protecting patient/service user safety and building trust in its use.
For example, it’s vital that issues such as “hallucinations” – where AI generates false or misleading information – are ruled out before any project starts. Bias, too, understandably, remains a concern because AI systems learn from information, and if that data reflects historical inequalities or lacks diversity, the resulting decisions can easily perpetuate those disparities.
These issues can be tackled from the outset with well-thought-out data selection and governance, as it ensures that training datasets are representative of the populations AI systems it aims to serve. This is especially important if it’s going to enable better integrated care, as it needs to cater for a range of different demographics and health and care needs. However, achieving this goes beyond the design of the technology alone – it requires collaboration and a commitment to fairness amongst those implementing the solutions. Critically, the Integrated Care Boards are well placed to help achieve this and so will be instrumental in its success.
Another important factor is ensuring that AI systems are rigorously tested and monitored. This can be done by embedding safeguards that detect and address issues such as hallucinations, by testing outputs across multiple scenarios and employing supervised learning. Involving human oversight at every stage can also maintain the reliability that is essential delivering integrated health and care services.
For health and care professionals to trust AI, there also needs to be suitable transparency. For example, technology solutions that operate as “closed boxes,” providing answers without explanation, can impact on the confidence of users and ultimately limit its adoption at scale.
That’s why we champion “open-box” systems that allow for meaningful collaboration between the workforce and technology, enabling clear, understandable insights. This transparency empowers staff, by combining human expertise with technological precision.
To foster as much trust as possible and ensure control stays in the hands of the people using the technology, we also align our approach with regulatory frameworks and societal expectations.
While AI offers immense potential for improved productivity, more seamless integration, and a shift to more preventative health and care, the benefits must always be weighed against ethical considerations.
Likewise, we’re on a journey – ethical AI isn’t a static destination, as is true of all digitisation. It requires a shared commitment across the health and care settings to establish guiding principles, foster collaboration, and adapt to emerging challenges.
While the future of AI is promising, its success will depend on our collective ability to work together and embed ethics at every stage. This way, we can ensure it serves the greater good, delivering progress that is as principled as it is impactful.
I’m delighted to be speaking more about this topic, as well as practical examples of how health and care settings are utilising cutting-edge technology to enhance collaboration across care services at Rewired on 18th March at 10.30am: Collaboration to put people at the heart of health and social care.
