PCORI's unique place in the health research landscape stems from our focus on outcomes that matter to patients. Research funded by PCORI compares two or more medical treatments, services or health practices and concentrates on healthcare challenges confronting families every day, from cancer and diabetes to healthy aging and maternal mortality.

Each day, new innovations and technologies in health care addressing these kinds of challenges are being identified and ultimately incorporated into practice, and as they are, PCORI helps to inform patients and caregivers about them to better inform their healthcare choices.

What Does 'New and Emerging Technologies' Mean?

Since 2019, PCORI has tracked new and emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt current standards of care. But what are new and emerging technologies?

PCORI defines them as:

• New and emerging interventions or therapies currently cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for phase II/III trials or those that may be approved in the next one to three years
• Interventions or therapies currently in clinical use without the need for FDA approval (such as off-label or repurposed for use in a particular condition or diagnostic) but lack sufficient evidence of efficacy

PCORI tracks new and emerging technologies through the Health Care Horizon Scanning System, which offers a systematic process for monitoring evidence, and the Emerging Technology and Therapeutics Reports, which assesses evidence. One topic from the program's most recent report Strategies to Improve the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Health Equity, is a timely exploration of ways to address equity-related issues raised by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health.

AI Used Across the Breadth of Heath Care

No longer exclusive to sci-fi movie plotlines, AI is being used across the expanse of healthcare applications-in clinical care, public health, medical research and more.

For instance, AI imaging technologies for preventive care screenings are being used to help produce results faster and more accurately. It also is being used as an avenue to improve health equity by linking AI-read images to data for identifying social determinants of health. This enables tailored interventions to be developed to improve health outcomes among populations with the most need.

Report Identifies Equity-Related Concerns, Strategies for Improvement

To identify issues AI presents for health equity and ways to mitigate disparities-including some that were identified by patient advocates surveyed for this analysis-the report's authors reviewed hundreds of sources, including academic papers, news articles, regulatory documents and more and interviewed experts on how to improve AI's impact on health equity.

The report details 18 equity-related concerns or issues associated with AI's use in health. The three most prominent are:

• Unrepresentative data
• Bias ingrained in data
• Limited information on population characteristics

Importantly, the report also identified 15 proposed strategies to address those concerns, with the most frequently proposed being:

• Improve diversity, quality and quantity of data inputs
• Evaluate disparities in model performance
• Increase model reporting and transparency

Findings Present Opportunities for More Research

Mitigating health equity issues associated with the use of AI doesn't come down to a single remedy. Rather, it will take exploring multiple areas of research, regulation and practice to move this truly innovative and rapidly developing tool toward promoting health equity.

Some areas of possible future research include:

• Repurposing AI applications outside their original scope
• The impact of insufficiently detailed population characteristics
• Using sensitive data such as patient race in developing and evaluating AI models

PCORI's Tracking Efforts Help Steer Funding Initiatives

As AI continues to help healthcare professionals conduct care for patients, PCORI's efforts tracking developments in AI before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic have helped us generate research funding initiatives related to methods, health systems and patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research.

This work also helps advance PCORI's National Priority for Health to achieve health equity. Monitoring and evaluating the newest innovations in health care, like the myriad and ever-evolving uses of AI, moves us toward the goal of expanding stakeholder engagement, research and dissemination approaches that lead to continued progress toward achieving health equity in the United States.

Explore our website to learn more about our efforts to track developments in health care that represent some of most innovative treatments and interventions available.

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