Scoring Rubric to Assess Ethical Issues in Clinical Artificial Intelligence Tools

With the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in clinical care, it is essential to assess ethical issues related to using these tools, both before and after deployment. To address this need, a multidisciplinary team of clinical and AI experts developed and tested a scoring rubric to evaluate AI tools in clinical settings from an ethical perspective, considering potential issues that may arise during their use. The rubric provides a replicable scoring system comprising five content areas and four scoring categories. The content areas include evaluation population, accessibility, clinical bias, user control, and monitoring and updates. To test the applicability of the rubric, we applied it to three AI tools designed for clinical decision-making, clinical documentation, and clinical image analysis. The evaluation relied solely on publicly available information to simulate typical clinical settings. The rubric addresses a critical gap in the evaluation and governance of clinical AI tools by providing a structured framework to assess their ethical aspects. This approach enables healthcare systems to address and monitor the ethical impact of AI tools, fostering greater trust among clinicians and patients and guiding improvements in clinical practice.