AI for Digital Health Equity: challenges and opportunities
Inequity in health is a long-standing multi-faceted issue highlighted by the recent pandemic where people from ethnically diverse backgrounds were disproportionately affected. One factor is inequity via data and AI. If there is bias in the data or the model, doctors can potentially make wrong decisions and patients can get the wrong care. It can mean some groups of patients might inappropriately be prioritised over others for vaccines, hospital beds, or life-saving treatments. Professor Khalid leads the Planetary Health Informatics Lab at the University of Oxford which studies global health gaps or inequity via big health data and artificial intelligence. This research funded by HDR UK and the Alan Turing Institute aims to improve existing technology for predicting personalised future risk of health conditions, particularly those affecting overlooked groups of patients. The underlying concept is: better data, better AI, better care.
About the speaker
Prof. Sara Khalid is head of the Planetary Health Informatics Group at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine and a Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Data Science and Health Informatics at the University of Oxford. Her work applies artificial intelligence to international health data to better understand disease and fill gaps in global health. Sara is dedicated to co-creating equitable and ethical solutions for planetary health problems and works closely with interdisciplinary teams across the globe. She received her PhD in Engineering Science in 2013 and is involved in teaching several health data science courses, including the “Observational health data science: epidemiology, machine learning, and health economics” course she directs.
This lecture series is organised jointly by the Luxembourg Centre of Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at the University of Luxembourg and the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) with financial support from the National Research Fund (FNR).