Facilitating value considerations in design of machine learning-based tools for precision medicine
Thursday, October 12, 2023
2:30 PM – 3:45 PM ET
Location: Atlantic (Third Floor)
For the development of ethical machine learning (ML) for precision medicine, it is essential to understand how values play into the decision-making process of developers. In this study, we conducted five group design exercises and interviews with twenty developer participants to explore their design thinking in three different contexts. The group design exercises consisted of a series of hypothetical scenarios in which developers documented their process considerations using a virtual collaborative whiteboard platform. The first scenario involved designing a research project whose goal was to use ML to predict progression of pre-diabetes to diabetes. The second scenario involved the design of a tool to predict progression to diabetes for a large health care system, which was built upon in scenario three where developers were asked to imagine that they were also patients at said health care system. Our results suggest that developers more often considered client or user perspectives after changing the context of the scenario from research to a tool for a large healthcare setting. Furthermore, developers were more likely to express concerns arising from the patient perspective and societal and ethical issues such as protection of privacy after imagining themselves as patients in the health care system. These findings suggest that developers' design thinking can be shaped in the development of ML algorithms for precision medicine by encouraging “empathy work.” This research could inform the creation of educational resources and exercises for developers to better align daily practices with stakeholder values and ethical ML design.
Tehmi den Braven – Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics – Stanford School of Medicine; Pamela Sankar – Medical Ethics and Health Policy – Perelman School of Medicine; Mildred Cho – Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics – Stanford School of Medicine