RAISE-Health initiative launched to address ethical and safety issues around AI

Stanford Medicine and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (both CA, USA) have recently announced the launch of a pioneering initiative, termed RAISE-Health, to address both the ethical and safety issues of utilizing AI in healthcare.

RAISE-Health, which stands for Responsible AI for Safe and Equitable Health, is focused on three key objectives; defining a framework for ethical standards in this area, providing a platform for multidisciplinary experts to meet and establishing a resource on AI to host standards, tools, models, data, research and best practices.

“AI has the potential to impact every aspect of health and medicine. We have to act with urgency to ensure that this technology advances in line with the interests of everyone, from the research bench to the patient bedside and beyond,” commented co-founder of the initiative Lloyd Minor (Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence).

Other organizations following similar paths include UNESCO, who have published Recommendations on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Within this publication, UNESCO strongly encourages Member States to actively involve patients in all relevant steps of developing an AI-based program and pay particular attention to privacy issues.

On a similar thread, the European Commission have created ‘’Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI’, covering seven key requirements that AI systems should meet in order to be categorized as trustworthy. These include that AI systems should include intrinsic human oversight, be transparent, traceable and accountable. The guidelines also highlight that AI systems should be diverse, non-discriminatory and unbiased, something the field is still struggling with immensely 4 years after the publication of these particular guidelines.

Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/06/raise-health.htmlb