Valuing good health care: How medical doctors, scientists and patients relate ethical challenges with artificial intelligence decision‐making support tools in prostate cancer diagnostics to good health care

• Published in: Sociology of health & illness 2024-11, Vol.46 (8), p.1808-1827
• Main Authors: Hesjedal, Maria Bårdsen, Lysø, Emilie Hybertsen, Solbjør, Marit, Skolbekken, John‐Arne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Artificial Intelligence - ethics; Cancer; Challenges; Clinical decision making; Decision Making; Decision Support Techniques; Ethical dilemmas; Ethics; Health care; Health services; health technology; Humans; Justification; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical decision making; Medical ethics; Patients; Physicians; Physicians - psychology; Prostate; Prostate cancer; Prostatic Neoplasms - diagnosis; Qualitative Research; Social issues; values
• ISSN: 0141-9889; 1467-9566; 1467-9566
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.13818

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in health care to improve diagnostics and treatment. Decision‐making tools intended to help professionals in diagnostic processes are developed in a variety of medical fields. Despite the imagined benefits, AI in health care is contested. Scholars point to ethical and social issues related to the development, implementation, and use of AI in diagnostics. Here, we investigate how three relevant groups construct ethical challenges with AI decision‐making tools in prostate cancer (PCa) diagnostics: scientists developing AI decision support tools for interpreting MRI scans for PCa, medical doctors working with PCa and PCa patients. This qualitative study is based on participant observation and interviews with the abovementioned actors. The analysis focuses on how each group draws on their understanding of ‘good health care’ when discussing ethical challenges, and how they mobilise different registers of valuing in this process. Our theoretical approach is inspired by scholarship on evaluation and justification. We demonstrate how ethical challenges in this area are conceptualised, weighted and negotiated among these participants as processes of valuing good health care and compare their perspectives.