A #Houston#hospital is investigating whether a #doctor altered a #transplant list to make his patients ineligible for care. A disproportionate number of them have died while waiting for new #organs.
…Ofcls began investigating after…a complaint. An analysis found what the #hospital called “irregularities” in how #patients were classified on a #WaitingList for liver #transplants. When #doctors place a patient on the list, they identify types of #donors they would consider, incl’g age & weight.
Hospital ofcls said they found patients had been listed as accepting only donors w/ages & weights that were impossible—for instance, a 300-lb toddler—making them unable to receive any transplant.
#Algorithms#AlgorithmicBias#Healthcare#OrganAllocation#Transplants: "Systematic bias in algorithms can crop up for a variety of reasons, from the quality of underlying data used to train the systems — such as the skewed data from the 2019 study — to the unequal weighting of certain variables such as age, gender or race, which can inadvertently disadvantage specific communities. It’s why those who advocate for ethical use of these models, particularly in sensitive areas such as healthcare or policing, call for human oversight of all decisions and an appeal system that allows humans (surgeons, for example) to intervene if things don’t look quite right.
In an organ allocation system, difficult choices must be made. Because there aren’t enough livers for all 700 people on the UK’s list, “transplantation remains a zero-sum game and any adjustment in allocation is simply a case of causing harm to one to help another,” wrote Raj Prasad, a surgeon at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, in the Lancet this year.
But the question Jess was looking to answer was whether her sister was being unfairly and systematically passed over by the NLOS software, precluding her from ever receiving a liver through this method."
Scientists in China have successfully grown pig embryos with kidneys containing human cells, a breakthrough that could revolutionize organ transplants. While the experiment is promising, the researchers caution that there are still major challenges to overcome before the first recipient has surgery. Learn more about the next obstacles and ethical dilemmas.