AI and Healthcare Transformation: Economic, Legal, and Equity Perspectives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23064531Keywords:
machine learning, predictive healthcare, personalized medicine, health equity, algorithmic fairnessAbstract
Machine learning (ML) is increasingly presented as the enabling technology of predictive, personalized medicine. This review examines its promise and its limits from a perspective informed by economic history: health improvements in Europe have historically depended less on single inventions than on the institutions, complementary investments and distributional choices that surround them. Drawing on peer-reviewed clinical, computational and policy literature, the article maps the present scenario across four dimensions: clinical applications, data infrastructures, evidence and validation, and equity and regulation. It shows that ML now performs at or near expert level in narrow diagnostic and prognostic tasks, yet that real-world evidence remains uneven, that training data under-represent many populations, and that widely used algorithms have encoded structural inequality. The article then sets out a forward-looking agenda covering privacy-preserving collaboration, multimodal and foundation models, interpretability, economic evaluation and the productivity J-curve, and equity-by-design governance within the European regulatory environment. It concludes that predictive ML will contribute to personalized and equitable health systems only if data, validation, incentives and accountability are treated as public infrastructure rather than as by-products of algorithm development
References
• Acosta, J. N., Falcone, G. J., Rajpurkar, P., & Topol, E. J. (2022). Multimodal biomedical AI. Nature Medicine, 28(9), 1773–1784.
• Baldwin, P. (1990). The politics of social solidarity: Class bases of the European welfare state, 1875–1975. Cambridge University Press.
• Baumol, W. J. (2012). The cost disease: Why computers get cheaper and health care doesn't. Yale University Press.
• Beam, A. L., & Kohane, I. S. (2018). Big data and machine learning in health care. JAMA, 319(13), 1317–1318.
• Batar, S. CYBERCRIME AND LAW ENFORCEMENT: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS. Law & Order Administration, 61.
• Brynjolfsson, E., Rock, D., & Syverson, C. (2021). The productivity J-curve: How intangibles complement general purpose technologies. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 13(1), 333–372.
• Batar, S., Jha, R. S., Tyagi, N., Jain, V., & Chaudhary, A. (2020). Protection of Software-Patent or Copyright?. Our Heritage, 68(1), 134-143.
• Batar, S. PATENTING BIOTECHNOLOGICAL INVENTIONS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS, 46.
• Chen, I. Y., Joshi, S., & Ghassemi, M. (2020). Treating health disparities with artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 26(1), 16–17.
• Dubey, B., & Kant, N. (2024). Revitalizing Indigenous Justice: Mediation in India’s Tribal Justice System. International Journal of Research in Management & Social Science, 12(1), 24-32.
• Collins, F. S., & Varmus, H. (2015). A new initiative on precision medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(9), 793–795.
• Cutler, D. M., & McClellan, M. (2001). Is technological change in medicine worth it? Health Affairs, 20(5), 11–29.
• David, P. A. (1990). The dynamo and the computer: An historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. American Economic Review, 80(2), 355–361.
• Deaton, A. (2013). The great escape: Health, wealth, and the origins of inequality. Princeton University Press.
• Esteva, A., Kuprel, B., Novoa, R. A., Ko, J., Swetter, S. M., Blau, H. M., & Thrun, S. (2017). Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks. Nature, 542(7639), 115–118.
• Fogel, R. W. (2004). The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World. Cambridge University Press.
• Ghassemi, M., Oakden-Rayner, L., & Beam, A. L. (2021). The false hope of current approaches to explainable artificial intelligence in health care. The Lancet Digital Health, 3(11), e745–e750.
• Gulshan, V., Peng, L., Coram, M., Stumpe, M. C., Wu, D., Narayanaswamy, A., … Webster, D. R. (2016). Development and validation of a deep learning algorithm for detection of diabetic retinopathy in retinal fundus photographs. JAMA, 316(22), 2402–2410.
• Kaissis, G. A., Makowski, M. R., Rückert, D., & Braren, R. F. (2020). Secure, privacy-preserving and federated machine learning in medical imaging. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2(6), 305–311.
• Kelly, C. J., Karthikesalingam, A., Suleyman, M., Corrado, G., & King, D. (2019). Key challenges for delivering clinical impact with artificial intelligence. BMC Medicine, 17, Article 195.
• Marmot, M. (2005). Social determinants of health inequalities. The Lancet, 365(9464), 1099–1104.
• Mehrabi, N., Morstatter, F., Saxena, N., Lerman, K., & Galstyan, A. (2021). A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys, 54(6), Article 115.
• Muehlematter, U. J., Daniore, P., & Vokinger, K. N. (2021). Approval of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based medical devices in the USA and Europe (2015–20): A comparative analysis. The Lancet Digital Health, 3(3), e195–e203.
• Obermeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., & Mullainathan, S. (2019). Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Science, 366(6464), 447–453.
• Rajkomar, A., Dean, J., & Kohane, I. (2019). Machine learning in medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 380(14), 1347–1358.
• Rajkomar, A., Hardt, M., Howell, M. D., Corrado, G., & Chin, M. H. (2018). Ensuring fairness in machine learning to advance health equity. Annals of Internal Medicine, 169(12), 866–872.
• Rajkomar, A., Oren, E., Chen, K., Dai, A. M., Hajaj, N., Hardt, M., … Dean, J. (2018). Scalable and accurate deep learning with electronic health records. npj Digital Medicine, 1, Article 18.
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union, L, 2024/1689.
• Regulation (EU) 2025/327 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 February 2025 on the European Health Data Space. Official Journal of the European Union, L, 2025/327.
• Rieke, N., Hancox, J., Li, W., Milletarì, F., Roth, H. R., Albarqouni, S., … Cardoso, M. J. (2020). The future of digital health with federated learning. npj Digital Medicine, 3, Article 119.
• Rudin, C. (2019). Stop explaining black box machine learning models for high stakes decisions and use interpretable models instead. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(5), 206–215.
• Seyyed-Kalantari, L., Zhang, H., McDermott, M. B. A., Chen, I. Y., & Ghassemi, M. (2021). Underdiagnosis bias of artificial intelligence algorithms applied to chest radiographs in under-served patient populations. Nature Medicine, 27(12), 2176–2182.
• Singhal, K., Azizi, S., Tu, T., Mahdavi, S. S., Wei, J., Chung, H. W., … Natarajan, V. (2023). Large language models encode clinical knowledge. Nature, 620(7972), 172–180.
• Sirugo, G., Williams, S. M., & Tishkoff, S. A. (2019). The missing diversity in human genetic studies. Cell, 177(1), 26–31.
• Sudlow, C., Gallacher, J., Allen, N., Beral, V., Burton, P., Danesh, J., … Collins, R. (2015). UK Biobank: An open access resource for identifying the causes of a wide range of complex diseases of middle and old age. PLoS Medicine, 12(3), e1001779.
• Topol, E. J. (2019). High-performance medicine: The convergence of human and artificial intelligence. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 44–56.
• Vayena, E., Blasimme, A., & Cohen, I. G. (2018). Machine learning in medicine: Addressing ethical challenges. PLoS Medicine, 15(11), e1002689.
• Vokinger, K. N., Feuerriegel, S., & Kesselheim, A. S. (2021). Mitigating bias in machine learning for medicine. Communications Medicine, 1, Article 25.
• Wiens, J., Saria, S., Sendak, M., Ghassemi, M., Liu, V. X., Doshi-Velez, F., … Goldenberg, A. (2019). Do no harm: A roadmap for responsible machine learning for health care. Nature Medicine, 25(9), 1337–1340.
• Wong, A., Otles, E., Donnelly, J. P., Krumm, A., McCullough, J., DeTroyer-Cooper, O., … Singh, K. (2021). External validation of a widely implemented proprietary sepsis prediction model in hospitalized patients. JAMA Internal Medicine, 181(8), 1065–1070.
• World Health Organization. (2021). Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health: WHO guidance. WHO.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Amit Kumar , Rituraj Soni (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


