Our mission
The implementation of medical AI tools in healthcare raises hopes for improved patient care, enhanced efficiencies, and reduced costs. Unfortunately, many factors hinder the adoption of medical AI: uncertainties about effectiveness; potential risk of harm to patients; financial costs; mistrust in machine-induced diagnosis and prediction; regulatory ambivalence; and ethical considerations.
Our mission at The Hastings Center’s Initiative for Medical AI (IMAI) is to advance the ethical implementation of medical AI, with a focus on the prioritization of patients’ best interests and the core tenets of medical professionalism, positioning The Hastings Center for Bioethics and its affiliated partners as the premier international network for scholarship and leadership in ethical medical AI and its implementation.
IMAI accomplishes its mission by:
Coordinating and funding multidisciplinary AI research among researchers at The Hastings Center and recognized research centers and hospital systems in the U.S. and internationally;
Providing consultation and assistance to those delivering clinical care on the implementation of new AI tools developed by IMAI affiliates;
Researching the efficacy, ethics, and economics of new medical AI tools;
Developing best practices to facilitate AI implementation in hospitals, both in their clinical and regulatory aspects.
Insoo Hyun, MA, PhD
Senior Researcher, The Hastings Center for Bioethics
Affiliate, Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School
Visiting Professor Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine National University of Singapore
Frank C. Schuller, MBA, PhD
Senior Researcher, The Hastings Center for Bioethics
Collaborative Researcher, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
Director of Economic and Implementation Research, Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, MIT
The IMAI Network
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IMAI Founding Co-Director
Hastings Center Senior Researcher
Insoo Hyun, PhD, has held several appointments at Harvard Medical School, where he was Director of Research Ethics, a faculty member in the Center for Bioethics, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Previously, Dr. Hyun was Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, where he taught undergraduate, graduate, and medical students for over 18 years. He is a Hastings Center Fellow.
Dr. Hyun’s research interests include stem cell ethics and policy, the clinical translation and implementation of emerging technologies such as medical AI and bioengineering, and new strategies for community and stakeholder engagement. Since 2005, Dr. Hyun has been heavily involved with the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), helping to draft every version of the ISSCR’s international research guidelines and serving twice as Chair of the ISSCR Ethics Committee.
Dr. Hyun received his BA and MA in Philosophy with Honors in Ethics in Society from Stanford University and his PhD in Philosophy from Brown University. He has been interviewed frequently on National Public Radio and has served on national commissions for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington D.C. He is a regular contributor to Nature, Science, Cell Stem Cell and an editorial board member of the Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence. He is the author and editor of several books, including Bioethics and the Future of Stem Cell Research, published by Cambridge University Press.
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IMAI Founding Co-Director
Hastings Center Senior Researcher
Dr. Frank C. Schuller has been undertaking research for the past several years on the implementation of clinical AI with the Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health at MIT. His research has concentrated on impediments to adoption of AI technology in hospitals and healthcare centers. This research is an outgrowth of his research on surgical innovation at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England and his previous investigations into the innovation process and its evolution from a scientific invention to a commercial product or service. Dr. Schuller’s research examines economics with inherent ethical considerations of AI applications in healthcare systems in the United States and abroad.
As an economist, Dr. Schuller has published several articles on the implementation of clinical AI in hospitals in the United States and in countries around the world. His articles include economic analyses of AI applications that screen and predict the likelihood of a patient contracting cancer and the ethical implications of integrating medical AI into medical institutions. He has also written articles on strategic analysis for corporate strategy using clustering, an unsupervised AI algorithm. In supervising graduate students in economics, he has developed mathematical formulae with logistic regression to assess probabilities from disparate distributions.
Dr. Schuller received an MBA and a doctorate from Harvard University, where he taught in the Business School and in the Kennedy School of Government as a director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Centre.
Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PHD
Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and Editor-in-Chief of NEJM AI
Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He served as co-author of the Institute of Medicine Report on Precision Medicine that has been the template for national efforts. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales: from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism.
Over the last 30 years, Kohane’s research agenda has been driven by the vision of what biomedical researchers could do to find new cures, provide new diagnoses and deliver the best care available if data could be converted more rapidly to knowledge and knowledge to practice. In so doing, he has designed and led multiple internationally adopted efforts to “instrument” the healthcare enterprise for discovery and to enable innovative decision-making tools to be applied to the point of care. At the same time, the new insights afforded by ’omic-scale molecular analyses have inspired him and his collaborators to work on re-characterizing and reclassifying diseases such as autism, rheumatoid arthritis and cancers. In many of these studies, the developmental trajectories of thousands of genes have been a powerful tool in unraveling complex diseases.
In 1987, Kohane earned his MD/PhD from Boston University and then completed his post-doctoral work at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he has since worked as a pediatric endocrinologist. He joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1992, serving as Director of Countway Library from 2005 to 2015 and as Co-Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics during the same period, before it became the Department of Biomedical Informatics in July 2015. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and authored the widely-used books Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics (2003) and The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond (2023).
VARDIT RAVITSKY, PHD
President and CEO, The Hastings Center for Bioethics
Vardit Ravitsky is President and CEO of the Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute that is among the most prestigious bioethics and health policy institutes in the world. She is a Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously, she was a Full Professor at the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health, University of Montreal. She is Past-President of the International Association of Bioethics, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of The Hastings Center for bioethics.
Ravitsky’s research focuses on the ethics of genomics and reproduction, as well as the ethics and governance of health AI. She is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural frameworks shape public debate and public policy around bioethical issues. Her work has been funded by Canada’s national and provincial funding agencies and is currently funded by the NIH and by leading Foundations. She has published over 250 articles and commentaries on bioethical issues and has given over 300 talks world-wide and over 400 media interviews.
Her research covers a variety of topics such as public funding of In-Vitro Fertilization; the use of surplus frozen embryos; posthumous reproduction; genetic testing of in-vitro embryos; gamete donation; prenatal testing; germline and somatic gene editing; mitochondrial replacement; and the use of Artificial Intelligence in biomedical research and healthcare. She has been engaged in research and policy regarding pandemic ethics and was heavily involved in public outreach during COVID-19.
Ravitsky is a Principal Investigator on two Bridge2AI research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health that expand the use of AI in biomedical and behavioral research. She served on the steering committee of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) to develop an Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct (AICC).
Ravitsky holds a BA from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Previously, she was Fellow at the Department of Bioethics at the NIH and faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at CIHR’s Ethics Office and a consultant to Genome Canada on Ethical, Economic, Environmental, Legal and Social aspects of Genomics Research (GE3LS).
The Hastings Center for Bioethics is the world’s leading independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute.
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