Ethical and social issues related to use of AI-based decision support tools in healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems may aid healthcare professionals in the analysis of increasingly huge amounts of health data and allow for making more accurate decisions about medical care of patients. Such AI decision support tools for healthcare are being developed in Sweden, which aims to be a leader in the AI field.

The use of AI in healthcare brings many promises, yet it also raises ethical, legal, and social issues.

The overall purpose of this project is to identify and investigate the ethical and social implications related to the use of AI decision support systems in healthcare, with a particular attention to the Swedish context.

To achieve this goal, this study will consist of the following parts: 1) a state of the art review of the technologies and their applications, in particular of those developed in Sweden, 2) a theoretical analysis of ethical implications related to the use of the technologies in healthcare, 3) an interview study of stakeholders’ views on the use of AI in the Swedish healthcare.

This research will be largely based on biomedical ethics principles (autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice) and will combine theoretical and empirical (i.e. interview study) analyses, which will feed into each other.

Diversity (including gender) perspective will be considered in this project, in particular the problem of bias in the design of AI systems and in datasets which are used to train them; these forms of bias may potentially result in discrimination of some groups (e.g. ethnic minorities) if the system would be used in the clinic.

This study will engage end users of these technologies, that is healthcare professionals and will explore their perspective on the implementation of AI tools.

The results of this empirical exploration and theoretical analysis will provide policy-relevant insights and potential solutions related to ethical and social problems posed by the AI technology, particularly in the Swedish context.