2.H. Pro/con workshop: Whether AI will decrease health inequalities or deepen them?
Authors:   Organised by: EUPHA-ETH,   Chair persons: Farhang Tahzib (EUPHA-ETH), Monica Brînzac (EUPHAnxt)
Published: October 2023

Reasons for the workshop

Every new health technology is hoped to help address leading public health problems. Undoubtedly, AI technologies can be useful in many ways in healthcare systems and health care delivery. For example, AI algorithms can help diagnostic process while reducing waiting times and costs. Virtual health assistants can provide personalised health advice regardless of race or socio-economic status. Telehealth platforms can reduce social inequalities by facilitating healthcare delivery and consumption. Digital health and drones can overcome geographical barriers for certain services. However, it has been shown that AI can also deepen health inequalities. For example, some algorithms were less accurate for ethnic minorities because they had been trained on patients from the population majority. Replacement of healthcare professionals by AI technologies can affect adversely already disadvantaged populations relying on traditional healthcare. For AI to be effectively used in developing countries various barriers need to be overcome, such as health and digital illiteracy, and “digital divide’.

Objectives of the workshop

1. To benefit from bringing together in one place highly qualified specialists in the fields of public health ethics and digital health to enable the audience to familiarise themselves with the main sides of the debate around the utility of AI in solving health inequities.

2. Based on the presentations and subsequent discussions, to generate new ideas for further research on the topic.

Added value of organising the workshop

1. Provision of platform for high-level professional discussion of AI effects on strategic aims of public health, such as bridging health inequalities, within specialists in both fields public health ethics and digital health.

2. Collecting and responding to immediate audience reactions in view of possible future challenges to EUPHA as organisation to issue an opinion related to particular AI application for public health goals.

Format of the workshop

The workshop will feature two panelists who will respectively defend opposing claims about the effect of AI on health inequalities. The two chairpersons will present the panelists and guide the discussion. The first chairperson will team with the first panelist and field questions from the audience about the negative effects of AI on health inequalities. The second chairperson will team with the second panelist and field questions about the positive effects of AI on health inequalities. Finally, the audience will make an impromptu vote on which arguments were more convincing. The discussions will be wrapped up towards the conclusion of the workshop.

Key messages

• The applicability of AI in health care to solve dominant public health problems must be explicitly sought but we must be aware of the dual nature of AI.

• When it comes to AI in health care, the precautionary principle must give way to risk mitigation in terms of increasing health inequalities, which should be applied at the development stage.

Speakers/Panelists

Silviya Yankulovska

MU-Pleven, Faculty of Public Health, Pleven, Bulgaria

Els Maeckelberghe

University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands