To Realize AI’s Promise for Health, Public Health Must Help Shape Its Future.
To Realize AI’s Promise for Health, Public Health Must Help Shape Its Future
A new commentary by Debbie Cheng highlights the need for public health leadership to build trustworthy artificial intelligence in health.
From disease surveillance to clinical care, artificial intelligence is transforming health. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in decisions affecting population health, a new commentary argues that realizing AI’s full potential requires public health leadership alongside technical innovation.
Debbie Cheng, assistant dean of data science and lead author of a new commentary published in the American Journal of Public Health makes the case that public health leadership is essential to building trustworthy AI in health. Sandro Galea, dean of the Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, and Madhu Mazumdar, director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery Science at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, coauthored the article.
“Public health is a field that has spent decades developing methods to evaluate interventions, monitor impacts, and address inequities,” says Cheng, who is also professor of biostatistics and a Hariri Institute Core Faculty member. “Those strengths are highly relevant to AI. It has enormous potential to improve population health, and the greatest opportunity comes when public health expertise helps shape it from the outset.”
Read more about the commentary on The Hariri Institute’s website.