There’s no quick fix to find racial bias in health care algorithms
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20995178/racial-bias-health-care-algorithms-cory-booker-senator-wyden
Reported today in The Verge.
There's no quick fix to find racial bias in health care algorithms
Legislators in Washington, DC are taking a closer look at racial bias in health care algorithms after an October analysis found racial bias in a commonly used health tool. Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) released letters on Tuesday calling for federal agencies and major health companies to describe how they're monitoring the medical algorithms they use every day for signs of racial bias.
"Unfortunately, both the people who design these complex systems, and the massive sets of data that are used, have many historical and human biases built in," they wrote to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The senators' focus for their letters was mostly on gathering information. They wanted to know if the CMS, which administers Medicare and Medicaid, is collecting information from health care organizations on their use of algorithms. They asked the Federal Trade Commission if it was investigating harm caused by discriminatory algorithms on consumers and asked the health companies, including Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield, if and how they audit the algorithms they use for bias.
Equity in health care depends on identifying and rooting out bias in algorithms. But because the programs are still relatively new, there still aren't best practices for how to do so. "These practices bubbling up are more like best efforts," says Nicol Turner-Lee, a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.
There are tools designed to detect bias in algorithms, as the senators' note in their missives, built by private companies like IBM and nonprofits like The Alan Turing Institute. But they're not perfect solutions, and they don't weed out all