As the use of AI continues to proliferate in healthcare, radiologists may be opening themselves up to a whole new set of liability concerns.
Harvard and University of Michigan experts outlined some of those issues in a JAMA viewpoint piece published Oct. 4. The authors noted that current laws only hold providers liable when they fail to follow standards of care, resulting in injury. So, the safest way to deploy AI in radiology would be using it to confirm current practices rather than harnessing it to improve care.
However, doing so may limit the vast potential of machine learning in imaging and other parts of care, wrote Nicholson Price, a Michigan professor of law, and colleagues.
“Although many physicians may be comfortable with this approach, the challenge is that current law incentivizes physicians to minimize the potential value of AI,” the team wrote. “Because threat of liability encourages physicians to meet and follow the standard of care, they may reject such recommendations and thus fail to realize the full value of AI, in some cases to patients’ detriment,” they added later.
The viewpoint’s authors believe that standards of care may eventually shift to a point where AI-guided decision-making is the norm. Until then, Price and company offer radiology business leaders four tips to navigate the murky waters of AI and malpractice:
- School yourself on how best to use and interpret AI algorithms, including ideal situations to deploy them and how much confidence to place in their recommendations.
- Encourage professional radiology societies to evaluate any practice-specific algorithms, and guide future adoption of these tools in a reliable, safe and effective manner.
- Ensure that administrative efforts to develop and deploy AI reflect what is actually needed in day-to-day clinical care, and also advocate for safeguards to make sure those products are thoroughly vetted.
- Check with your organization’s malpractice insurer to understand how your carrier covers the use of AI. Radiologists may be able to make demands that help to shape future coverage.
“As AI enters medical practice, physicians need to know how law will assign liability for injuries that arise from interaction between algorithms and practitioners. These issues are likely to arise sooner rather than later,” the authors concluded.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.