Impacts on Trust of Healthcare AI

Artificial Intelligence and robotics are rapidly moving into healthcare, playing key roles in specific medical functions, including diagnosis and clinical treatment. Much of the focus in the technology development has been on human-machine interactions, leading to a host of related technology-centric questions. In this paper, we focus instead on the impact of these technologies on human-human interactions and relationships within the healthcare domain. In particular, we argue that trust plays a central role for relationships in the healthcare domain, and the introduction of healthcare AI can potentially have significant impacts on those relations of trust. We contend that healthcare AI systems ought to be treated as assistive technologies that go beyond the usual functions of medical devices. As a result, we need to rethink regulation of healthcare AI systems to ensure they advance relevant values. We propose three distinct guidelines that can be universalized across federal regulatory boards to ensure that patient-doctor trust is not detrimentally affected by the deployment and widespread adoption of healthcare AI technologies.