Health Law Advisor

Would it surprise you if I told you that a popular and well-respected machine learning algorithm developed to predict the onset of sepsis has shown some evidence of racial bias?[1]  How can that be, you might ask, for an algorithm that is simply grounded in biology and medical data?  I’ll tell you, but I’m not going to focus on one particular algorithm.  Instead, I will use this opportunity to talk about the dozens and dozens of sepsis algorithms out there.  And frankly, because the design of these algorithms mimics many other clinical algorithms, these comments will be applicable to clinical algorithms generally.