Patient safety and quality improvement: Ethical principles for a regulatory approach to bias in healthcare machine learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accumulating evidence demonstrates the impact of bias that reflects social inequality on the performance of machine learning (ML) models in health care. Given their intended placement within healthcare decision making more broadly, ML tools require attention to adequately quantify the impact of bias and reduce its potential to exacerbate inequalities. We suggest that taking a patient safety and quality improvement approach to bias can support the quantification of bias-related effects on ML. Drawing from the ethical principles underpinning these approaches, we argue that patient safety and quality improvement lenses support the quantification of relevant performance metrics, in order to minimize harm while promoting accountability, justice, and transparency. We identify specific methods for operationalizing these principles with the goal of attending to bias to support better decision making in light of controllable and uncontrollable factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.312 | 0.403 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.088 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".