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What happens when robots, AI, and big data enter the hospital? Glenn Cohen (a professor and deputy dean at Harvard Law School) is unpacking that question in this exploration of biotechnology, ethics, medical law, and health care policy. Each week, he’ll interrogate a single technology – such as digital pills, AI-powered decision support algorithms, or digital health apps – through the lens of ethical concerns like informed consent, liability, and privacy.
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Professor Glenn Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School interviews Dr. Rochelle Walensky, 19th Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Senior Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center. They discuss Dr. Walensky’s career as an infectious disease clinician focused on HIV/AIDS, her experience lead…
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Should Social Robots be Used to Provide Emotional Support? PARO is a cuddly baby seal used as an emotional companion robot in elder care. Emotional companion robots provide some of the benefits of therapy animals, without the attendant challenges of a live animal. But while emotional companion robots can provide comfort to older adults, they might …
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How Should We Regulate Digital Health Technology? The current digital health marketplace has been described as a wild west. Every day, consumer products making strong claims are brought to market without sufficient evidence and often withdrawn only when enforcement actions are brought against them. There are already apps that claim to detect melano…
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How AI Bias Is Affecting Health Care—And What We Can Do About It People are biased, and people build AI, so AI are biased, too. When AI is used in hospitals to treat patients, that bias comes to health care. For example, a 2019 paper in Science found that a commercial risk-prediction tool was less likely to refer equally sick Black people than whit…
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How secure is data collected by digital pills? Ingestible electronic sensors (IESs or “digital pills”) can be taken with or as a part of a drug in order to collect and record patient data, such as medication adherence or physiological metrics. This information can then be shared with relevant parties, including the patient, family members, and heal…
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Who Is Liable When AI Injures a Patient? Medical errors happen; doctors are only human. And when doctors make mistakes, the law pertaining to who is liable is usually clear-cut. But what happens if the mistake was made by an AI, included one embedded in a device or a robot? This episode will explore who is liable. Is it the hospital? The developer …
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Do You Own Your Personal Health Data? Every time you visit the doctor, heaps of personal health data are stored in electronic medical records, a mainstay of the modern health care industry. The rise of big data in healthcare comes with risks, however. Health data is now being sold to external companies and researchers. So, can you own your personal…
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Should We Tell Patients When AI is Being Used in Their Care? Increasingly, AI is being used in hospitals without patients’ knowledge of its use in their care, let alone their consent. For example, AI is being used to predict the likelihood that a cancer patient will die within the next six months. Hospitals and clinicians are deploying this technol…
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