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A cautionary tale about the adoption of medical AI in Sweden

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 5, pages 5–7 (2023)Cite this article

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A recent case of a flawed medical AI system that was backed by public funding provides an opportunity to discuss the impact of government policies and regulation in AI.

Sweden, like several other countries, has ambitions to become a leader in the race to realize the potential of artificial intelligence (AI)1. However, caution is necessary in such attempts, as there are many potential legal, ethical and political issues to tackle, as demonstrated by a recent attempt to implement an AI system in one-third of primary public healthcare centres in Sweden. The system received a European grant despite design flaws and incorrect details in the grant application. In addition, the procurement process suffered from several irregularities, which eventually led to criminal convictions. In what follows, I describe this particular case and use it to illustrate the need to scrutinize government funding and implementation of AI systems in society, especially in healthcare.

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Acknowledgements

I thank S. Slokenberga, D. Trubnikov and M. Johansson for helpful comments on the earlier version of this article, and P. Robinson for help with language editing. This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare via grant “Ethical and social issues related to use of AI-based decision support tools in healthcare” (2020-01089).

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  1. Medical Ethics Division, Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Emilia Niemiec

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  1. Emilia Niemiec
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Correspondence to Emilia Niemiec.

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Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Douglas Miller and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Niemiec, E. A cautionary tale about the adoption of medical AI in Sweden. Nat Mach Intell 5, 5–7 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00602-4

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