A Mass General Brigham executive was on Capitol Hill recently to lobby lawmakers for more oversight of healthcare artificial intelligence, Politico reported.
Keith Dreyer, PhD, chief data science officer of the Somerville, Mass.-based health system, met with congressional staffers in mid-April to encourage more regulation of the technology that is rapidly expanding in healthcare, according to the April 22 story.
"It needs quite a bit of oversight because, if you build these systems wrong, they will make mistakes," he told the news outlet. "And if you don't monitor these systems, they might even start out good, but they can turn bad."
Some members of Congress are favoring a less aggressive regulatory approach, with U.S. Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., who's aspiring to lead the Senate Republicans, saying he was aiming toward "using a light touch rather than a heavy hand," according to the story.
The FDA now approves some AI tools but even then the algorithms are constantly changing as they're fed new data, Politico reported. "I had 10 years of experience of watching these algorithms not do good things when they haven't been approved," Dr. Dreyer told the publication. "There's no control over how these things are going to get used after they get put out — there's a lot of unintended consequences."