The Stanford Healthcare Ethical Assessment Lab for Artificial Intelligence conducts ethical assessments of individual AI use cases being proposed for implementation at Stanford Health Care Facilities. And patients are helping to reshape those decisions.

STAT News featured the lab, which is co-directed by SHP’s Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, a professor of health policy and of law, highlighting how Stanford patients are “reshaping tech decisions from alert fatigue to missed diagnoses and overnight blood draws.”

Mello and Danton Char, MD, a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist and a bioethics researcher, run a patient panel for the lab to get their input on their hopes and concerns about AI in health care.

“It’s really easy for clinicians, quality leaders, informatics leaders to fall in love with technological solutions, especially at a place like Stanford where there’s just so much innovation and excitement about it,” Mello told STAT. But, she added, the human element of patient experience should complement AI solutions.

Mello, Char, and two patients who Stanford Health Care patients who participate in the Stanford panel, recently published an editorial in BMJ Digital Health & AI describing the effort and what it has accomplished.

“A year in, our experience is that patients provide valuable, actionable insights about responsible AI use—without compromising the timeliness of assessments,” they wrote.

Go to STAT Article About the Lab