CHAI Unveils ‘Responsible Use’ Guidelines for AI in Healthcare

The group, comprised of health systems and vendors, has released an Assurance Standards Guide for AI in healthcare and is seeking public comments for the next 60 days.

A coalition of health systems and AI companies working with the federal government on AI standards is seeking public comments on a new draft framework for responsible use of AI in healthcare.

The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) released the Assurance Standards Guide this week and will be gathering opinions over the next two months.

“Shared ways to quantify the usefulness of AI algorithms will help ensure we can realize the full potential of AI for patients and health systems,” Nigam H. Shah, MBBS, PhD, chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care and a co-founder and board member of CHAI, said in a press release. “The guide represents the collective consensus of our 2,500 strong CHAI community including patient advocates, clinicians and technologists.” 

Formed in 2023, CHAI includes Stanford, the Mayo Clinic, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Google, and Microsoft. It now boasts more than 2,500 members and has been working with the National Health Council and health standards organization HL7.

[Read also: AI Coalition Pushes Forward With Governance Plans.]

CHAI executives say the guide, part of a package of documents called the Assurance Reporting Checklists, aligns with the National Academy of Medicine’s AI Code of Conduct, the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, several frameworks from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Cybersecurity Framework from the Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Responses.

Also included are six use cases for AI:

• Predictive EHR Risk Use Case (Pediatric Asthma Exacerbation)
• Imaging Diagnostic Use Case (Mammography)
• Generative AI Use Case (EHR Query and Extraction)
• Claims-Based Outpatient Use Case (Care Management)
• Clinical Ops & Administration Use Case (Prior Authorization with Medical Coding)
• Genomics Use Case (Precision Oncology with Genomic Markers)

“We reached an important milestone today with the open and public release of our draft assurance standards guide and reporting tools,”. Brian Anderson, MD, CHAI’s president and chief executive officer and an associate professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, said in the press release. “This step will demonstrate that a consensus-based approach across the health ecosystem can both support innovation in healthcare and build trust that AI can serve all of us.”