AI is poised to make a huge impact on healthcare, but what about the ethics?

• Healthcare organisations are aggressively adopting AI
• But health executives say they are not prepared to face the societal and liability issues that will require them to explain their AI-based actions and decisions
• Accenture maintains the healthcare field needs new capabilities to ensure that technology acts with responsibility and transparency as it evolves

Every now and then a quick panic about artificially intelligent robots emerges from somewhere to get everyone thinking and debating about the nature of AI and whether it represents a threat to us all. The current round has surfaced news that Silicon Valley titans, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, were in flat disagreement. Elon identifies with the ‘Killer Robots are a real threat’ tendency, Mark identifies (of course) with the techno-optimists and thinks Elon is being alarmist.

Most of us probably think that if there is a potential problem (of the “when robots get much smarter than us what’s to stop them taking over or being misused to allow someone else to take over” tendency) it’s still a way off and in the meantime it makes for interesting after-dinner conversation.

But is it? Machine intelligence might not take over, but what happens when it gets so advanced we no longer know what it’s up to.

In a recent interview I was rather taken with the protections advocated by Hayim Porat, CTO of ECI Telecom who, in the context of network management, maintained that we must ensure that the machine(s) can always communicate with us about what they’re doing and why. There are practical reasons for this, such as being able to avoid potential disaster if the AI net management no longer worked and it was back to manual.

But it’s also a psychological comfort and a theoretical brake on runaway intelligence. The task of explaining and having us dummies understand might be so intelligence-sapping for the machines  that AI advance might slow to a human pace.

It’s an idea that might chime with research on healthcare being undertaken by Accenture which has found that the healthcare industry is “aggressively adopting intelligent technologies, such as the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), but that many health organizations need new capabilities to ensure that technology acts with responsibility and transparency as businesses evolve.

“As AI continues to play a greater role in [medical] decision-making, four-fifths (81 percent) of health executives said they are not prepared to face the societal and liability issues that will require them to explain their AI-based actions and decisions. As a result, about three-fourths (73 percent) said they plan to develop internal ethical standards for AI to ensure that their AI systems act responsibly.”

Or maybe they should ensure the intelligent system can explain its thinking, every step of the way.

June 11, 2018

Health Organizations Are Embracing Intelligent Technologies but Must Do More to Prepare for Societal Impact, Accenture Report Finds

CHICAGO; June 11, 2018 – A new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has found that the healthcare industry is aggressively adopting intelligent technologies, such as the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), but that many health organizations need new capabilities to ensure that technology acts with responsibility and transparency as businesses evolve.

According to the report, Digital Health Technology Vision 2018, more than three-fourths (77 percent) of the 100 health executives surveyed said they expect to invest in IoT and smart sensors this year – the highest among the 20 industries included in the broader Accenture Technology Vision research on which the health industry report was based. In addition, more than half (53 percent) of the health executives expect to invest in AI systems, with four-fifths (86 percent) of the executives saying that their organizations use data to drive automated decision-making at an unprecedented scale.

Accenture Digital Health Technology Vision 2018** from **Accenture

However, as AI continues to play a greater role in decision-making, four-fifths (81 percent) of health executives said they are not prepared to face the societal and liability issues that will require them to explain their AI-based actions and decisions. As a result, about three-fourths (73 percent) said they plan to develop internal ethical standards for AI to ensure that their AI systems act responsibly.

In addition, health organizations also face a new kind of vulnerability: inaccurate, manipulated and biased data that leads to corrupted insights and skewed results. More than five-sixths (86 percent) of health executives have not yet invested in capabilities to verify data sources across their most critical systems. In addition, one-fourth (24 percent) of the executives said that they have been the target of adversarial AI behaviors, like falsified location data or bot fraud.

The report is derived from Accenture’s most-recent annual technology report, Accenture Technology Vision 2018, which predicts key trends likely to disrupt business over the next three years, including virtual/augmented reality, blockchain and edge computing. Among the findings from healthcare executives about these technologies:

• More than four in five (82 percent) of the executives said that extended reality – comprising virtual- and augmented-reality technologies – removes the hurdle of distance in access to people, information and experience, with nearly half (48 percent) of health providers and one-sixth (16 percent) of health payers planning to invest in these technologies in the next year.
• Nine-tenths (91 percent) of health executives believe that blockchain and smart contracts are critical to enabling a frictionless business over the next three years, and approximately the same number (88 percent) believe that microservices will be crucial for scaling and integrating ecosystem partnerships.
• Four-fifths (82 percent) of health executives believe that “edge” architecture will speed the maturity of hyperconnected health environments, and slightly more (85 percent) believe that generating real-time insights from the volumes of data expected in the future will require computing “at the edge,” where data is generated. Yet the vast majority (86 percent) of health executives believe that they’ll need to balance cloud and edge computing to maximize technology infrastructure agility and enable intelligence everywhere throughout their organization.

“Intelligent technologies, such as AI, are enabling health organizations to evolve at speed, collaborate with other entities and create deeper, more meaningful relationships with patients across various care settings,” said Kaveh Safavi M.D., J.D., head of Accenture’s global health practice. “As this paradigm-shifting technology evolves – making business more dynamic than ever before – organizations will remain responsible for demonstrating data stewardship and designing systems with trust and transparency to bolster the societal benefits of these technologies.”

To learn more, register for the Accenture 2018 Digital Health Tech Vision Webcast taking place on July 18 at 11 am Eastern Time.

Methodology

The Accenture Technology Vision is developed annually by the Accenture Labs and Accenture Research. For the 2018 report, the research process included gathering input from the Technology Vision External Advisory Board, a group comprising more than two dozen experienced individuals from the public and private sectors, academia, venture capital firms and entrepreneurial companies. In addition, the Technology Vision team conducted interviews with technology luminaries and industry experts, as well as with nearly 100 Accenture business leaders. In parallel, Accenture Research conducted a global online survey of more than 6,300 business and IT executives across 25 countries and 18 industries to capture insights into the adoption of emerging technologies.

The healthcare industry report, Digital Health Technology Vision 2018, is based on C-level responses from 100 health organizations. The survey helped identify the key issues and priorities for technology adoption and investment. Respondents were mostly C-level executives and directors, with some functional and line-of-business leads, at companies with annual revenues of at least US$500 million, with most having annual revenues greater than US$6 billion.