The Need for Health AI Ethics in Medical School Education

Health Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve health care, but at the same time, raises many ethical challenges. Within the field of health AI ethics, the solutions to the questions posed by ethical issues such as informed consent, bias, safety, transparency, patient privacy, and allocation are complex and difficult to navigate. The increasing amount of data, market forces, and changing landscape of health care suggest that medical students may be faced with a workplace in which understanding how to safely and effectively interact with health AIs will be essential. Here we argue that there is a need to teach health AI ethics in medical schools. Real events in health AI already pose ethical challenges to the medical community. We discuss key ethical issues requiring medical school education and suggest that case studies based on recent real-life examples are useful tools to teach the ethical issues raised by health AIs.