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February 8, 2019, 12:00 PM

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Couldn't join us for the event? Check out some of the panelists' slide presentations below!

Description

Black-box medicine—the use of opaque computational models to make care decisions—has the potential to shape health care by improving and aiding many medical tasks. For example, IBM Watson for Oncology is a machine-learning system that intends to help clinicians quickly identify essential information in patients’ medical records and explore treatment options for 13 cancers. However, it has only recently emerged that the recommendations Watson for Oncology gave for cancer treatments were “often incorrect” and that IBM kept this defect secret for over a year. What are the ethical and legal issues of black-box medicine? When do algorithms operate like a “black box“? How can we ensure that artificial intelligence technologies deliver what they promise?

This event was free and open to the public.

Panelists

  • I. Glenn Cohen, Faculty Director and James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Harvard Law School and Faculty Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School

  • Ziad Obermeyer, Acting Associate Professor, Health Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health

  • Moderator: Carmel Shachar, Executive Director, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School

Learn more

Slide presentation

The Health Policy and Bioethics Consortia is a monthly series that convenes two international experts from different fields or vantage points to discuss how biomedical innovation and health care delivery are affected by various ethical norms, laws, and regulations.

They are organized by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in collaboration with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Support provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.


Videos

VIDEO: Carmel Shachar, Introductory Remarks

VIDEO: I. Glenn Cohen, "Big Data, AI, and Health Care, Legal and Ethical Issues"

VIDEO: Ziad Obermeyer, "The Power of Black Boxes"

VIDEO: Audience Q & A

Tags

artificial intelligence   bioethics   biotechnology   genetics   health law policy   health policy and bioethics consortia   intellectual property   medical safety   regulation