The Digital healthcare ethics laboratory (Digit-HeaL) has published its second scientific paper in the high-level journal International Journal of Medical Informatics (Q1 – IF = 4.046) under the title Ethical, legal, and social considerations of AI-based medical decision-support tools: A scoping review. The authors of the paper are Anto Čartolovni, head of the Digit-HeaL lab research group, Ana Tomičić, member of the Digit-HeaL lab research group and Elvira Lazić Mosler from the School of Medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia.

The paper is focused on the ethical, legal, and specifically on the social implications (ELSI) of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Social implications of AI in healthcarehave largely been overlooked in in the literaturebut deserve to be considered with equal attention in the development stage of AI, and certainly ahead of its implementation in healthcare. The paper is intended to guide various stakeholders (eg. designers, engineers, clinicians) in addressing the ELSI of AI at the design stage using the Ethics by Design (EbD) approach. The most prevalent issues are patient safety, algorithmic transparency, lack of proper regulation, liability & accountability, impact on patient-physician relationship, and governance of AI empowered healthcare. The results of review confirm the potential of AI to significantly improve patient care, but the drawbacks to its implementation relate to complex ELSI that have yet to be addressed.

This article was supported by the Croatian Science Foundation within the framework of the research project “(New) Ethical and Social Challenges of Digital Technologies in the Field of Health Care” (UIP-2019-04-3212).