Machine MD: Six Case-studies of the Law & Ethics of Health-Related AI in Canada
On Thursday 27 April 2023, the Health Law and Ethics Network co-hosted a hybrid seminar with Health, Law and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) and the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics with Professor Colleen M. Flood from the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) hold out the potential for revolutionary improvements in health care, but also present risks and raise questions as to whether existing laws are sufficient to meet the challenges raised by different forms of health-related AI.
In this presentation Professor Flood discussed insights from six multi-disciplinary case-study workshops, which interrogated the sufficiency of existing Canadian laws to meet the challenges posed by various health-AI. The innovations workshopped included a suicide-prediction application, a surgical decision-support tool, a self-driving wheelchair, a triaging tool for a paediatric emergency room, “digital twin” technology, and a tool for assessing the risk of cardiac arrest in a paediatric ICU, She explored whether existing privacy, liability, anti-discrimination and informed consent laws are sufficiently meeting the challenges of various health-related AI and what these case-studies suggest are gaps and solutions for the legal governance of health-AI.
View the event recording
About the presenter
Colleen M. Flood FRSC, FCAHS is a University of Ottawa Research Chair in Health Law & Policy and inaugural director of the Ottawa Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Her research interests are focused on the role of law in shaping health and health care systems and the appropriate roles for the public and private sectors. She is the principal investigator of a CIHR grant on the Governance of Health-Related Artificial Intelligence. Professor Flood is the author/editor of 13 books (several of which are in multiple editions), editor of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada - Public Health. 2019 (Reissue), co-editor of Vulnerable: The Law, Policy & Ethics of COVID-19 (uOttawa Press 2020) and co-editor of Administrative Law in Context (Emond, 2021)