Lawsuit Claims the Mayo Clinic's Use of AI Is Butchering Patient Care

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Source: Futurism

In a new civil suit, former Mayo Clinic research director and AI compliance lead Traci Tamiko Eto alleges that the globally recognized hospital retaliated against her for blowing the whistle on its disastrous implementations of AI health tools.

According to reporting by Minnesota Public Radio, Eto first joined the Mayo Clinic in 2023. After flagging potential privacy problems linked with the hospital’s Mayo Clinic Platform, an AI-integrated data system, Eto says her supervisor ignored her concerns. Instead, she says her boss “insisted” that fixing the issue would “jeopardize the pace on ongoing research projects, which in turn would compromise Mayo’s competitive advantage.”

Eto continued, MPR reports, flagging multiple failures of Mayo Clinic higher-ups to follow federal regulations on review processes of new tech, like MAYA, the clinic’s AI-integrated digital assistant. According to the lawsuit, the team working on MAYA deleted unflattering test results, mischaracterized the tool’s abilities, and made decisions that put data security in jeopardy.

Tucked inside her ten separate whistleblower complaints, MPR notes, is the allegation that the team working on MAYA knew the tool had an error rate as high as 67 percent. Eto alleges that instead of flagging that horrifying number, MAYA staffers tried to hide it.

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Read more: https://futurism.com/health-medicine/lawsuit-mayo-clinic-ai-tools-hospital-maya

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From a separate story by a Star Tribune writer:

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The lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, accuses Eto's superiors of manipulating the oversight process for medical research, which typically relies on independent institutional review boards (IRBs) to set the conditions by which studies can take place safely and ethically. Having an independent entity make those decisions is supposed to remove bias from research studies, but the lawsuit claims Mayo leaders in some cases pressured IRBs to approve studies, steered research proposals to IRBs that aren't as stringent, or just bypassed IRBs and green-lighted research on their own.

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The health system has positioned itself as a global leader in the development of AI technologies and tools to guide health care decision-making. A conference last month featured numerous studies by Mayo researchers about whether AI tools could predict cognitive declines in patients, assess the severity of head and neck tumors, or even predict tantrums in children with behavior disorders.

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Eto suffered depression and needed time off as a result of the work stress, the lawsuit alleges. When she returned to work, she was given weeks to find another role at Mayo or be terminated. The lawsuit also alleges Eto was largely responsible for the creation of one AI tool, but that Mayo de-emphasized her role in a patent application in a way that could limit her earnings from its commercial usage.

Specific allegations in the lawsuit include that Mayo researchers tried to cover up or ignore research results showing that the health system's MAYA digital assistant tool had a 67 percent error rate. In a separate situation, Eto claimed she opposed the use of a high-risk investigational medical device for a cardiac surgery because it hadn't been properly vetted by an IRB; she said her supervisor ignored her objection and approved the use of the AI-enabled device for a surgery in another country.

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