FILE PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration created on June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
(Corrects spelling of Dr. Chris Pernell's last name, paragraphs 9, 10, 14)
Dec 11 (Reuters) - The NAACP unveiled a blueprint on Wednesday aimed at preventing artificial intelligence from deepening racial inequities in U.S. healthcare, calling for bias audits and “equity-first” standards as hospitals, tech firms and regulators adopt AI tools.
The 75-page report, Building a Healthier Future: Designing AI for Health Equity, warns that algorithms used for diagnostics, treatment and insurance decisions risk perpetuating bias and "cultural blind spots" if generated without input and oversight.
"The NAACP is calling for urgent action to embed fairness, transparency, and community engagement into every stage of health AI development," said the report, which was first shared with Reuters. Its recommendations include transparency reports, data governance councils and community-based partnerships.
It is the latest step in the NAACP’s year-long drive to embed equity within emerging health technologies, a campaign the group says is central to its civil rights mission and closing disparity gaps among Black Americans. The organization is convening briefings, mobilizing state-level efforts and strategizing a legislative push to help set ethical guardrails.
The NAACP is also working with hospitals, tech companies and universities to pilot fairness standards and develop community literacy toolkits.
“When you have such a powerful tool and you look at health outcomes and health access, we must be a part of the conversation to ensure that bad data isn’t leveraged to further disparities among communities," NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in an interview.
The report, developed in partnership with French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, lays out a three-tier governance framework.
“What we mean in general by AI governance is building principles, concepts, frameworks for ensuring that as we begin to develop and deploy AI, that we do it in ways that are very intentional, very ethical ... in ways that don't scale or replicate historical disparities,” said taskforce chair Dr. S. Craig Watkins, the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor and executive director of the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
The NAACP is also working with other civil rights and health advocacy organizations and is in the very early stages of developing proposed legislation, according to Dr. Chris Pernell, director of the NAACP Center for Health Equity. The NAACP will participate in a congressional briefing soon on the usage of AI in the "rare diseases space."
"We are connecting and thinking about, more intentionally, how we engage Black legislators across the United States to show how regulatory frameworks, how policy proposals, can be developed that are ethically centered and equity focused," Pernell said.
The effort could face challenges. The health equity push comes as diversity, equity and inclusion programs face mounting rollbacks across corporate America and the U.S. federal government, with critics targeting race-conscious policies, saying they discriminate against white Americans and other groups. However, experts and civil rights leaders say those policies are necessary to address systemic inequities, including racial health disparities.
The report notes that studies show algorithms trained on incomplete datasets can miss diagnoses in Black patients or recommend less aggressive care. Using maternal mortality rates among Black women as a case study, the NAACP said that without intervention, such disparities could widen as AI adoption accelerates without proper protocol.
Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The drumbeat of the NAACP is that we must frame health equity as a human experience issue," Pernell said.
(Reporting by Kat Stafford; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
