Meharry SACS joins CHAI – Coalition for Health AI
Artificial intelligence has great potential to accelerate clinical research and improve patient care. At a time when AI seems poised for exponential growth, deep conversations about responsible use of AI in health care, especially in terms of health equity, are vital.
By joining CHAI, the Coalition for Health AI, Meharry School of Applied Computational Sciences is now an active participant in those discussions with leading industry members like Duke AI Health, Stanford and MITRE.
CHAI is a community of academic health systems, organizations and expert practitioners of AI and data science. According to their website, their mission is to provide guidelines regarding an ever-evolving landscape of health AI tools to ensure high quality care, increase credibility among users, and meet health care needs.
CHAI is playing a vital role to help develop guidelines around the incredibly powerful tool of AI,” says Nadine Shillingford, associate professor, computer science and data science. As an HBCU it is especially important that we are involved in these conversations as AI can increase bias that causes further harm in terms of health equity.”
Those discussions, according to Forbes, include federal observers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The collaborative work of CHAI’s membership takes place among several workgroups. Meharry SACs faculty are participating in the following groups.
Fairness
Nadine Shillingford, Ph.D., associate professor, computer science and data science.
Privacy and security
Uttam Ghosh, Ph.D., associate professor of cybersecurity.
Safety
Aize Cao, Ph.D., associate professor, biomedical data science
Transparency
Todd Gary, Ph.D., assistant professor, biomedical data science
Usefulness
Ashutosh Singhal, Ph.D., assistant professor, biomedical data science, and chief data officer and associate vice president, Enterprise Data Analytics
According to an April 2023 press release, CHAI has grown to over 150 organizations across academia, government, health care systems, and industry, and includes founding members Change Healthcare, Duke AI Health, Google, Johns Hopkins University, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, SAS, Stanford Medicine, University of California (UC) at Berkeley, and UC San Francisco.
