Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Health AI: CUIMC Team led by Dr. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee Awarded Supplemental Funds for AI Research

Modern healthcare is a dynamic landscape, demanding constant innovations in technology, medicine, and cutting-edge research. As digital health is further developed and integrated into clinical practice to fight against disease, diagnostic tools using AI are becoming rapidly more relevant. Despite the revolutionary disease-detecting potential of these tools, AI applications in digital health continue to raise ethical questions.

While there is growing evidence that AI technology is mimicking and perpetuating existing biases toward marginalized groups, there is a lack of research regarding how AI applied to digital health is evaluated against these harmful assumptions. Specifically, there is a lack of consensus on whether and how AI approaches in digital health include goals of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI).

A team led by Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D, Chief of the Division of Ethics and Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University, has initiated a bioethics supplement project focused on JEDI-AI: Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in AI. This project will create case studies to investigate ethical principles and JEDI goals as educational resources for developers and other stakeholders.

The year long study, started in July 2023, will analyze existing ethical frameworks in AI for clinical applications, focusing on integrating JEDI principles. The project aims to investigate how JEDI is implemented in AI research for digital health, with the ultimate goal of creating case studies with potential strategies for integrating JEDI objectives for AI developers, scholars, and scientists.

This multidisciplinary team joining Dr. Lee includes faculty, postdoctoral scientists and graduate students in biomedical informatics, bioethics, and science, technology and society studies, including:

Noémie Elhadad, PhD., Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Columbia University

Alexis Walker, PhD., Assistant Professor in the Division of Ethics in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University

Elise Zheng, PhD., Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Division of Ethics in the Dept of Medical Humanities at Columbia University

Harry Reyes Nieva, PhD., student in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Columbia University

Oliver Bear Don’t Walk, PhD., Postdoctoral Fellow in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington