STAT and MIT rooted out the weaknesses in health care algorithms. Here’s how we did it
In July 2021, STAT and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to answer a simple question with big implications for the use of AI in medicine: How do popular algorithms used to warn of bad outcomes for patients hold up over time?
The months-long experiment, born of a novel partnership in journalism and science, yielded an illuminating result: the algorithms deteriorated over several years, delivering faulty advice about which patients were at the highest risk of deadly complications and prolonged hospital stays.
