How bias creeps into data-driven healthcare to impact minority ethnic groups (and how to stop it) (30 November 2021)

Summary

Inequities in health and healthcare are a major challenge in the UK. Data-driven healthcare has the power to improve disease surveillance, enable better early detection of health conditions, allow for improved diagnosis, uncover novel treatments; all acting to facilitate more tailored therapy and personalised patient care. However, data-driven healthcare, including but not limited to, artificial intelligence solutions and large genetic datasets, has historically been developed using unrepresentative data which has resulted in bias. Such bias has major implications for the population groups underrepresented.

In this article, Niki O’Brien and Saira Ghafur explain the challenge of bias in data-driven healthcare and explore potential solutions, with examples from across critical sectors.