AI regulations in healthcare are, well, sort of nonexistent at the moment.
Congress was considering prohibiting states from regulating AI for the next 10 years, though that was scrapped from the June 6 “big beautiful” tax bill for a new proposal that restricts broadband funding in states that regulate AI.
At the same time, AI is popping up all over healthcare, from scribes to agents, and according to the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 75% of top healthcare companies are experimenting with generative AI. The research organization also reported that 82% of healthcare organizations plan to “implement governance and oversight structures for generative AI.”
That’s where the public-private Coalition for Health AI, or CHAI, comes in. Launched in December 2021, the group of 3,000 providers, tech companies, and other healthcare organizations—including Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and Mount Sinai—and are working together to create standards for AI in healthcare.
CHAI has a 180-page guide for responsible AI use in healthcare, released last June, which companies can reference when building out their models, including principles of trustworthy AI, system design, and monitoring.
“It started with a group of eight of us in the private sector coming together, agreeing that this is an effort building best practice frameworks,” Brian Anderson, CEO at CHAI, told Healthcare Brew. The group hopes to “provide the kind of guardrails and guidelines that build trust” across the spectrum, from payers to providers to patients.
What does CHAI recommend?
One of the core tenants of CHAI’s guidelines is that “transparency is critical,” Anderson said.
The company has what it calls a model card, which Anderson described as a “nutrition label” with information like metric goals, warnings, and testing types so providers and health companies can see what sorts of AI practices others use. For instance, if the Mayo Clinic had a new AI note-taking tool it was using, the model card would outline how the health system uses it, metrics to show performance (such as its safety and usefulness), and potential risks, biases as well as ethical considerations to keep in mind.
Fairness is also a key tenant of CHAI, Anderson said, to ensure training models are “highly effective on people” across the country, from rural states to urban areas to tribal nations.
CHAI’s focus is on the tech side, Anderson said, and it doesn’t advocate for any specific external regulations or federal policies.Though he said many members are most interested in regulations that don’t stifle innovation or create an “uncoordinated patchwork set of state regulations,” he added.
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“We want our public-sector colleagues to see CHAI as a resource to educate them on the principles of responsible AI and how the private sector is adopting, implementing, and moving forward in that space,” he said.
What’s CHAI working on now?
On June 11, CHAI announced a new partnership with the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that also sets standards for healthcare and accredits hospitals. For instance, the organization doles out a Gold Seal of Approval to healthcare organizations that hit certain quality and safety measures.
Together, the two organizations hope to “accelerate the development and adoption of AI best practices and guidance across the US healthcare system” by creating AI rules and tools as well as a new certification program “rooted in the Joint Commission’s platform for evidence-based standards and CHAI’s consensus-based best practices for health AI,” according to a release.
That guidance is coming in the fall, followed by the accreditation, the release said.
Another priority for the organization this year, Anderson said, is to connect with smaller providers, like community health centers, to “make an intentional, significant effort to build playbooks for those community clinics that don’t have the kinds of resources that an [academic medical center] has.”
The organization also announced Kyu Rhee, president and CEO of the National Association of Community Health Centers, as a new board member in February as a part of these efforts.
What are the benefits of CHAI for companies?
Emmanuel Oquendo, CEO of software company BrainHi, became a member of CHAI in November.
BrainHi, based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, helps automate phone calls and other operations for medical practices that need administrative support.
Oquendo joined CHAI, he said, because one of the organization’s principles is to ensure AI algorithms and models “are fine-tuned for specific communities’ needs.”
“There are some algorithms that might work great for a Caucasian community but not necessarily for other minorities, like Latinos, for example,” he said.
He was also inspired to join because CHAI provides an opportunity to learn and network with other healthcare experts about using AI “responsibly and securely,” he said.
Oquendo is now part of a CHAI working group developing guidelines on deploying AI chatbots in healthcare, and said CHAI provides him with valuable guidance to bring back to his own company’s best practices. “I felt that I would get very important information by being part of the community that I could share with my customers,” he said.