NCD warns Senate committee on danger of importing bias into healthcare through AI

The National Council on Disability submitted a statement for the record Tuesday to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's Subcommittee on Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness. The statement addressed the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare for the subcommittee's recent hearing titled "Less Hype, More Help: AI That Improves Safety, Productivity, and Care." NCD is an independent, bipartisan federal agency responsible for advising Congress, the President and federal agencies on disability policy. It recommended that policymakers be aware of the susceptibility of AI to develop explicit and implicit biases about people with disabilities and take steps to help avoid these biases from being learned. NCD Acting Chairman Neil Romano wrote that while the agency's research recognizes the potential benefits of utilizing AI to improve healthcare outcomes for people with disabilities, there exist some vulnerabilities in these technologies that could negatively impact the diagnosis and treatment of people with disabilities. The statement added that such issues could provide policymakers with erroneous information rather than accurate solutions. Since AI is intended to develop the same decision-making capabilities as humans, NCD cautioned that the technologies may inadvertently develop the same assumptions and biases about people with disabilities as healthcare professionals are already well-documented to harbor. For this reason, NCD advised establishment of regulation to ensure that AI is developed with data sets that include people with disabilities. NCD's 2024 report titled "The Implicit and Explicit Exclusion of People with Disabilities in Clinical Trials" analyzed the use of AI in clinical trials. Romano wrote that the report found a contributing factor to healthcare disparity outcomes for people with disabilities was physicians' erroneous assumptions about the values and expectations of their patients, assumptions that mirror widespread, stigmatized societal views about the disabled. Due to these concerns, NCD found that disability cultural competence should be a core strategy for the healthcare system in order to reduce healthcare disparities for people with disabilities. The full statement is available at NCD.gov.