Finding out how different groups think about AI in healthcare

We are starting to plan Work Package 5 for which we will conduct a set of focus groups with members of the public, patients, health care practitioners and AI developers. Focus group research involves a small number of people with similar characteristics, for example people who are all patients at Osaka University Hospital, being brought together to discuss certain issues or questions. The researcher or researchers act as facilitators in the discussion and are interested in how the group members talk about a particular topic or topics.

We will ask different stakeholder group to share their ideas about the adoption of AI technologies in clinical settings, focusing on perceived benefits, risks and threats associated with implementation, and factors that influence such sentiments. We will further explore stakeholder attitudes towards the re-use of health-relevant data by AI algorithms, or to inform their development, decision processes or accuracy.

We need to develop a series of questions for the focus groups and we have just started working on this. To create the questions, we are looking at the results of our Scoping review and Twitter studies, and also working with the Patient and Public Involvement Panels (PPIPs) and Advisory Panels in Osaka and Oxford. Through a process of co-production, we hope to go beyond the narrower researcher perspective to include insights from patients, citizens as well as our experts on the advisory board.