IT & Digital
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What Healthcare Providers Need to Know About the Senate’s $32 Billion AI Roadmap
Ziv Gidron Head of Content, Hyro
What Healthcare Providers Need to Know About the Senate’s $32 Billion AI Roadmap

Last week, the Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group—led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—put forward the first legislative roadmap of its kind to address the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the United States. While the roadmap does not contain any legislation itself, it provides committees within Congress with a framework to develop appropriate legislation. They hope to start passing bills before the end of the year.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Leads The Bipartisan Senate Ai Working Group

With China investing over $50 billion annually in AI, the roadmap hopes to address mounting fears that the US is falling behind in AI development and “cement US dominance”. To achieve this, a $32 billion surge in emergency funding has been requested for research and development. 

This roadmap is the product of nine AI-focused educational forums that took place in 2023. Forums which brought together a bipartisan group of senators with leading figures in the AI space, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and more.

Sam Altman, Founder &Amp; Ceo Of Openai, Spoke At One Of The Educational Forums In 2023

What exactly is in the 30-page roadmap? Where will the money go? And why should healthcare providers care? Let’s break it down.

AI Transformation and Regulation: A Fine Balance

The roadmap aims to strike a delicate balance by not only powering innovation but also mitigating risk.

Chuck Schumer describes taking steps to “pursue and perfect innovation in two ways:”

Transformational Innovation

Put simply, it describes AI’s power to change the world as we know it. Within health care, senators were excited by the prospect of “curing illnesses like cancer and Alzheimer’s… in just a few years’ time”.

They also envision a future where healthcare is more affordable for taxpayers by curing different illnesses and improving organizational efficiencies. AI tools like Hyro are already doing the latter.

Sustainable Innovation

The roadmap also emphasizes the need to prevent AI transformation from spiraling out of control. In particular, it focuses on the need to avoid damaging the labor workforce, prevent built-in bias, and honor intellectual property.

To address these concerns, the roadmap offers legislative guidance to governmental committees. It underscores the importance of establishing guardrails that mitigate these risks while guaranteeing that innovation proceeds within the bounds of the law.

For example, the roadmap tackles the ‘black box’ nature of AI systems. New language surrounding regulation has been provided to allow regulators access to the information needed to ensure systems are compliant with existing laws. 

Ai Black Box

In high-risk cases of AI (healthcare falls under this category), additional case-by-case requirements around transparency, explainability, and testing may be appropriate. In fact, it explicitly states, “the opaque nature of some AI systems may be unacceptable”.

AI Roadmap: The Healthcare Perspective

So, what changes are on the horizon? Five ‘suggestions’ have been presented to relevant governmental committees – let’s take a look:

I. A patient-centric approach

 

Further deployment of AI in healthcare should include legislative efforts to implement guardrails and safety measures to protect patients. Examples included fraud prevention, consumer protection, and the use of accurate and representative data.

II. Data governance

 

The roadmap aims to make healthcare and biomedical data available for machine learning and data science research. However, it advises caution and sensitivity when addressing privacy issues stemming from sensitive data.

III. Risk-benefit analysis

 

Steps will be taken to provide the proper means and tools for relevant governmental organizations (FDA, HHS, etc.) to consider the benefits and risks of AI-enabled products effectively.

IV. Public trust and transparency

Future legislation will be introduced to make both the use and methods of AI-based products and services more transparent to the public. This will include information on which tools are used and the data that each AI model is built upon.

V. The greater good

Committees will consider new policies to promote AI systems that positively impact patient health outcomes, such as novel medical devices and treatments. They will also consider policies that make overall healthcare delivery more efficient and affordable. 

From a sustainable innovation perspective, policies that guardrail healthcare services to ensure appropriate use and accountability will also be pushed forward.

What Happens Next?

The question is: Will the Senate’s recommendations—particularly the release of $32 billion in funds—pass a divided Congress?

Policymakers have often left it too little too late to regulate new technologies, and pessimists will point to conservative pressure to cut government spending. But despite a divided Congress, both parties are on the same page about the need to be ahead of China in the quest to understand, pioneer, and regulate AI.

Overall, the roadmap is “the most comprehensive and impactful bipartisan recommendations on artificial intelligence ever issued by the legislative branch,” according to Senator Todd Young.

For those excited by AI, the roadmap is a promising first step towards responsible AI innovation on a national level, with development and regulation going hand-in-hand.

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About the author
Ziv Gidron Head of Content, Hyro

Ziv is Hyro’s Head of Content, a conversational AI expert, and a passionate storyteller devoted to delivering his audiences with insights that matter when they matter most. When he’s not obsessively consuming or creating content on digital health and AI, you can find him rocking out to Fleetwood Mac with his four-year-old son.

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