Drawing on insights from DIA’s 2024 Global Annual Meeting, Martin Hodosi and Rosanna Lim of Kearney Healthcare and Life Sciences examine some of the key ethical challenges around integrating AI into healthcare.
While the potential for AI is undeniable, the healthcare industry faces a big predicament: how to adopt AI rapidly without stifling innovation under the weight of uncertainty and risk. The stakes are higher than ever. Every delay means keeping patients waiting for AI’s potential life-extending benefits.
At DIA’s 2024 Global Annual Meeting, healthcare stakeholders talked openly about the need to balance AI-driven innovation with the ethical challenges AI presents. As the saying goes, we are now in a situation where we need to build the airplane while we are flying it.
The industry has confronted ethics and safety challenges before; from early public safety scandals such as the thalidomide crisis, we learned the need for rigorous oversight. Now, as AI accelerates rapidly, a balanced approach is essential to make sure that overcaution doesn’t delay critical advancements and that the necessary oversight is in place. In other words, ethical issues such as bias, patient privacy, and transparency must be addressed head-on without stalling progress.
The Urgency of AI Adoption in Healthcare
Despite AI’s vast potential, the healthcare sector has been slower to adopt these technologies compared with industries such as financial services, which receive significantly higher AI investment.
By 2025, healthcare is forecast to make up only 3.5% of AI investments across seven global industry sectors (transportation, consumer, government, financial services, industrial, IT, and healthcare), according to PitchBook’s 2023 Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Overview. This discrepancy reflects the risk-averse nature of the healthcare sector. Regulatory uncertainties, patient safety concerns, and the inherent complexity of healthcare data are among the factors holding back more widespread AI implementation.
At the same time, we are seeing growing demand for AI-driven healthcare solutions from both patients and providers. Patients, empowered by their own research and digital tools, are more informed than ever. They approach their physicians with specific questions based on AI-generated health information, pushing the healthcare system to adapt.
Patient advocacy groups such as The Light Collective are leading the charge to shape AI policy with the concerns of patients in focus, through projects such as the Patient AI Rights Initiative. This shift toward patient empowerment is forcing the industry to confront the ethical and operational challenges AI presents.
Read the full interview on the DIA Global Forum website here
