Abstract
Black-box medicine—the use of big data and sophisticated machine learning techniques for health-care applications—could be the future of personalized medicine. Black-box medicine promises to make it easier to diagnose rare diseases and conditions, identify the most promising treatments, and allocate scarce resources among different patients. But to succeed, it must overcome two separate, but related, problems: patient privacy and algorithmic accountability. Privacy is a problem because researchers need access to huge amounts of patient health information to generate useful medical predictions. And accountability is a problem because black-box algorithms must be verified by outsiders to ensure they are accurate and unbiased, but this means giving outsiders access to this health information.
This article examines the tension between the twin goals of privacy and accountability and develops a framework for balancing that tension. It proposes three pillars for an effective system of privacy-preserving accountability: substantive limitations on the collection, use, and disclosure of patient information; independent gatekeepers regulating information sharing between those developing and verifying black-box algorithms; and information-security requirements to prevent unintentional disclosures of patient information. The article examines and draws on a similar debate in the field of clinical trials, where disclosing information from past trials can lead to new treatments but also threatens patient privacy.
Publication Date
2016
Journal Title
Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Roger Allan Ford & W. Nicholson Price II, Privacy and Accountability in Black-Box Medicine, 23 MICH. TELECOM. & TECH. L. REV. 1 (2016).
Included in
Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment Commons, Chemicals and Drugs Commons, Computer Sciences Commons, Law Commons, Statistics and Probability Commons
Additional Information
After June 2017, this article is available for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.