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- Five Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to introduce legislation regulating the use of AI in healthcare.
- The bill aims to ensure human oversight in medical decisions, transparency in AI usage, and minimize bias.
- It mandates insurers, hospitals, and clinicians to attest to minimizing bias and discrimination in AI use.
- Several other states have also started enacting laws to regulate AI’s role in healthcare decisions.
Four Pennsylvania House Democrats and one Republican will propose rules to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in health care, worrying that an overreliance on the rapidly growing technology could lead to bias and discrimination in decision-making without transparency and human oversight.
Reps. Arvind Venkat, Tarik Khan, Greg Scott and Bridget M. Kosierowski, all Democrats, and Rep. Joe Hogan, a Republican, announced their intention to introduce the legislation “to ensure all Pennsylvanians, especially patients, can be assured that this technology is being used in a beneficial manner.”
Venkat, who represents a portion of Allegheny County and who is the only physician in the General Assembly, said in a statement that he’s witnessed the rapid growth of AI in health care and that the legislation aims to “make sure Pennsylvanians can be confident that AI is being used responsibly and effectively.”
“We have already seen evidence that AI usage can reinforce bias and discrimination,” Venkat said. “This will allow us to ensure that insurers, clinicians and hospitals use AI effectively and do not use it to perpetuate potentially harmful biases in the medical field.”
Major investments in AI ahead
According to a May report from Grand View Research, AI in the health care market is expected to become a $188 billion industry worldwide by 2030.
“Clinical decision support systems, fueled by artificial intelligence, empower physicians and healthcare professionals with predictive and real-time analytics, enhancing decision-making and elevating care quality, ultimately resulting in improved patient outcomes,” the report notes. “Furthermore, AI facilitates a comprehensive understanding of disease biology and patient pathology, advancing precision medicine and precision public health initiatives.”
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the second-largest hospital system in Pennsylvania, is using Microsoft’s Dax CoPilot to document information provided by patients and physicians during exams, for example, as the Erie Times-News reported earlier this year. The AI assistant helps save physicians time inputting information into a patient’s medical chart, which they spend on average 2 hours a day doing. It’s among the leading causes of physician burnout.
But it’s also being used to monitor heart signals and detect heart attacks, for example, and extract relevant information from large data sets, or to pair patients with clinical trials.
“AI certainly has the ability to enhance all aspects of human life, including the health care space — but it should never replace the expertise or judgement of health care clinicians,” Scott, of Montgomery County, said in a statement. “I embrace technology and use it daily, but as an EMT, I know firsthand that understanding a person’s medical history and needs requires a human element that a computer algorithm cannot fully appreciate. I’m hopeful that this bipartisan effort will create a framework to support innovation, but not at the expense of human life.”
What the Pa. AI health care bill would do
The forthcoming legislation, according to the bipartisan group of House cosponsors, would
- require a human to make the ultimate decision based on an individualized assessment when insurers, hospital or clinicians use AI in order to prevent an over-reliance on the technology;
- require insurers, hospitals and clinicians to be transparent in how they use AI; and
- require insurers to provide an attestation to the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance, and require hospitals and clinicians to provide an attestation to the Pennsylvania Department of Health that bias and discrimination in their use of AI have been minimized. They would also have to provide evidence of how that determination was made.
“As AI becomes a bigger part of our day-to-day lives, we must make sure it is not being over-relied on in our health care system,” Hogan, the Bucks County Republican, said. “This legislation would make sure that there is still a human element in place when determining life and death decisions.”
Khan, of Philadelphia, said an unjust denial from an insurance company that used AI to make such a determination would be “outrageous” and said the bill would “put patients back in charge of their care.”
Kosierowski, of Lackawanna County, who has worked as a nurse for almost three decades, said the introduction of AI makes it even more important to have experienced physicians and nurses making sure the technology is accurate and not basing decision on bias or discrimination.
“This bill would protect patients and provide the guardrails needed to ensure AI is used responsibly and effectively in the health care industry in our commonwealth,” she said.
Several states have passed legislation requiring health providers and insurers to disclose when AI is being used to make certain decisions about patient care and under which circumstances humans are required to make final determinations. Utah, for example, requires companies to disclose when people are interacting with AI chatbots and lawmakers have also moved to protect people who are interacting with AI chatbots for mental health services. And Colorado law allows patients to appeal health care decisions in cases where AI is used.