Fairness in Health Care Data Analytics

Apr 10, 2018

9:30 am - 10:30 am

Orchard View Room, Discovery Building

Pilar Ossorio PhD, JD

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Recently, scholars of machine learning and big data analytics have engaged in several conversations about fairness. Some of these conversations have to do with the ways in which machine learning algorithms might learn the conscious or unconscious biases that humans bring to activities such as hiring, school admissions, or decisions about incarceration.  We should be having a similar conversation about the use of data from healthcare systems, including data from electronic health records.  This presentation will briefly discuss different conceptions of fairness, will describe some mechanisms by which unfair inequality is known to or is likely to be reflected in health records, and will present some reasons why it might be difficult to determine when unequal treatment of people in a healthcare system is morally wrong.  Identifying unfairness in healthcare is not always straightforward.  Finally, I will consider some approaches we might use to identify possible unfairness in the datasets used to train machine learning algorithms, or in the predictions/classifications these algorithms produce.

Dr. Ossorio is Professor of Law and Bioethics where she is on the faculties of the Law School and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. In 2011 she became the inaugural Ethics Scholar-in-Residence at the Morgridge Institute for Research, the private, nonprofit research institute that is part of the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery. She also serves as the co-director of UW's Law and Neuroscience Program, as a faculty member in the UW Masters in Biotechnology Studies program, and as Program Faculty in the Graduate Program in Population Health. Prior to taking her position at UW, she was Director of the Genetics Section of the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, and taught as adjunct faculty at the University of Chicago Law School.

Dr. Ossorio received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 1990 from Stanford University. She went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship in cell biology at Yale University School of Medicine. Throughout the 1990's Dr. Ossorio also worked as a consultant for the federal program on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the Human Genome Project, and in 1994 she took a full time position with the Department of Energy's ELSI program. In 1993 she served on the Ethics Working Group for President Clinton's Health Care Reform Task Force. She received her JD from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law in 1997. While at Berkeley she was elected to the legal honor society Order of the Coif and received several awards for outstanding legal scholarship.


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