Black Box Medicine
Petrie-Flom Academic Fellow alumnus Nicholson Price, now an Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law, has recently published an article in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology on a development in personalized medicine that he calls "black box medicine," which he defines as the use of opaque computational models to make decisions related to health care. From the article:
This Article introduces into legal scholarship the concept of blackbox medicine, which I define as the use of opaque computational models to make decisions related to health care. Blackbox medicine, pursued by geneticists, personalized medicine advocates, and other health care innovators, already does and increasingly will use the combination of largescale highquality datasets with sophisticated predictive algorithms to identify and use implicit, complex connections between multiple patient characteristics. A defining feature of blackbox medicine is that those algorithms are nontransparent — that is, the relationships they capture cannot be explicitly understood, and sometimes cannot even be explicitly stated. Note that this type of medicine is “blackbox” to everyone by nature of its development; it is not “blackbox” because its workings are deliberately hidden from view. By capturing complex underlying biological relationships — and by potentially allowing their use with algorithmic validation rather than relying on clinical trials — blackbox medicine opens far more possibilities for shaping treatment and drug development. Although blackbox medicine presents major challenges at conceptual, scientific, and legal levels, it also offers a faster path to medical advances that might otherwise lie many decades in the future.
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biotechnology health information technology health law policy human subjects research regulation