Bias in AI: Illuminating the Unseen with Dr. Tania Martin-Mercado

04/28/22 • 42 min

On the latest episode of Chilcast: Healthcare Tech Talks, we are delighted to feature an interview with Dr. Tania Martin-Mercado, an expert in clinical research, biotech and public health. She joins Chilmark Senior Analyst Jody Ranck for a discussion on the issue of bias in AI: how it’s harmful to patients individually and our culture as a whole, how to add diversity to data teams in meaningful and authentic ways, and what organizations can do to tackle this issue as more algorithms are deployed for care delivery.

Previous Episode

Time to Move Beyond 'Sick Care' to True Health Care

It takes all types, especially to throw a mammoth conference like HIMSS. Payers, providers, investors and solutions vendors all gather together in their tens of thousands under one roof to discuss the future of technology in healthcare. From all over the world, the experts in the field travel to learn, give presentations, network with their peers, and attempt to divine the future of the market.

But one group is usually underrepresented: educators. Injecting new blood and fresh ideas into healthcare tech will be an important component of revitalizing our battered healthcare system. Yet professors and universities in the sorely needed tech education sector were few and far between at the conference this year.

To be sure, medical and nursing schools occupied a solid place in the conference agenda. Provider systems nationwide are in the midst of a nerve-wracked hand-wringing session when it comes to the looming staffing crisis, which is already bad and getting worse. However, if someone wants to work in healthcare without being a doctor or a nurse, the options are less clear.

We were able to sit down with Dr. Gabriela Wilson, Professor and Co-Director at the Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics, UT-Arlington, to discuss these issues and more. She brings decades of experience in biochemistry, biotechnology, molecular biology and informatics to the table, along with a wider global perspective on healthcare in America.

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Walled Gardens to Network Effects with Jonathan Bush

ChilCast: Healthcare Tech Talks - Bias in AI: Illuminating the Unseen with Dr. Tania Martin-Mercado

Transcript

Dr. Tania: [00:00:00] And unfortunately the use of race is still commonplace when designing clinical algorithms — I don't mean Health and Human Services or outreach programs, I mean specific to clinical decision making — race is still a factor, even though it is widely known. This is not new information among scientific and research communities that race is not a biological issue, it is a social issue. So we know this, it seems like in science and research and in health ca