Cedars-Sinai Joins 40 Health Systems in White House Effort on AI

Cedars-Sinai has joined a White House initiative aimed at ensuring healthcare providers and companies use artificial intelligence (AI) ethically and responsibly. Together with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the AI effort—announced in late 2023—is a consortium involving nearly 40 health systems and insurers.

“Cedars-Sinai is honored to be part of this collective commitment to responsible AI use in healthcare, acknowledged by the White House,” said Craig Kwiatkowski, PharmD, senior vice president and chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai. “This pledge reflects our dedication to principles that prioritize fairness, appropriateness, validity, effectiveness and safety in leveraging AI for scientific discoveries and improved patient care.”

As described by the White House, members’ voluntary commitments reflect a series of actions that underscore three principles that are fundamental: safety, security and trust.

In joining the initiative, Cedars-Sinai committed to:

• Vigorously develop AI solutions to optimize healthcare delivery and payment by advancing health equity, expanding access, making healthcare more affordable, improving outcomes through more coordinated care, improving patient experience, and reducing clinician burnout.
• Ensure outcomes are aligned with fair, appropriate, valid, effective and safe AI principles—called “FAVES” in AI circles.
• Deploy “trust mechanisms” that inform users if content is largely AI-generated and not reviewed or edited by a human. 
• Adhere to a risk management framework that includes comprehensive tracking of applications powered by frontier models and an accounting for potential harms and steps to mitigate them.
• Research, investigate, and swiftly develop AI solutions, but do so responsibly.

These commitments align with Cedars-Sinai’s AI strategy, which is led by its AI Council. The AI Council brings together cross-functional leaders—from patient care, research, data and technology teams—to review, guide and coordinate the health system’s AI strategy. The council provides a forum for open dialogue and an ongoing exchange of ideas while setting institutional and system priorities, evaluating the use of AI tools and identifying measures of success.

Jason Moore, PhD, a founding member of the AI Council and chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai, says the White House initiative affirms Cedars-Sinai’s commitment to the ethical, responsible and scientifically sound use of AI.

“As one of the early adopters of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, Cedars-Sinai ensures our endeavors are not only conducted ethically and responsibly, but also significantly enhance the lives of our patients,” Moore said. “This White House initiative is another tool in our arsenal to ensure that our research and applied uses are innovative, patient-centric and long lasting.”   

In addition to the White House Initiative on Healthcare AI, Cedars-Sinai recently joined the Trustworthy & Responsible AI Network, or TRAIN, governance network. Led by Microsoft, this network of healthcare institutions aims to put responsible AI guidelines into practice.

Through this consortium, the collective whole will align on operationalizing responsible AI principles to improve the quality, safety, and trustworthiness of AI in healthcare. Participants will share best practices and be provided with tools to enable measurement of outcomes associated with the implementation of AI.

Kwiatkowski said Cedars-Sinai will work with the network to advance internal tools and validation processes as the first step, and then look to build upon that via network collaborations, federated sharing models, and an AI outcomes registry.

“These projects and collaborations are critical to our ongoing efforts at Cedars-Sinai, and broadly within healthcare, as we continue to explore new tools and use cases,” said Kwiatkowski.

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