Promise or Peril?: Algorithmic Intelligence and Racial Discrimination in Health Care
Provider bias is a known driver of racial disparities in healthcare delivery. Through minimizing provider discretion, applications of algorithmic intelligence have the potential to reduce this kind of bias. But they also have the power to further institutionalize discriminatory logics through the same mechanism. In this lecture, I will consider how this transmutation of medical authority alters the institutional and interactional context of the health care encounter in ways that raises new versions of old concerns at the intersection of bioethics and the reproduction of racial inequality. LaTonya J. Trotter is an Associate Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Bioethics and Humanities. She is a sociologist of medicine who studies the existence and reproduction of inequality in the medical workplace. In her work, she takes an institutional view of ethics by considering how social and workplace institutions shape notions of responsibility and our understanding of what constitutes “good” or ethical decisions by individual, professional, and organizational actors. She explores these and other questions in her first book: More than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve For Patients, Health Care Organizations and the State.
Provider bias is a known driver of racial disparities in healthcare delivery. Through minimizing provider discretion, applications of algorithmic intelligence have the potential to reduce this kind of bias. But they also have the power to further institutionalize discriminatory logics through the same mechanism. In this lecture, I will consider how this transmutation of medical authority alters the institutional and interactional context of the health care encounter in ways that raises new versions of old concerns at the intersection of bioethics and the reproduction of racial inequality. LaTonya J. Trotter is an Associate Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Bioethics and Humanities. She is a sociologist of medicine who studies the existence and reproduction of inequality in the medical workplace. In her work, she takes an institutional view of ethics by considering how social and workplace institutions shape notions of responsibility and our understanding of what constitutes “good” or ethical decisions by individual, professional, and organizational actors. She explores these and other questions in her first book: More than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems they Solve For Patients, Health Care Organizations and the State.