The Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine is delighted to host another EU-funded research project focusing on Embedded Ethics in the development of generative AI for healthcare. Marie-Christine Fritzsche, researcher at IHEM, will lead the ethics research of the European project AIM-SAFE, a consortium of 25 institutions from 14 European countries. The project aims to develop clinical decision support tools driven by artificial intelligence in order to improve the safety of drug treatments, especially for patients with multiple medications. It is funded by Horizon Europe within the highly competitive GenAI4EU initiative.

AIM-SAFE seeks to create AI analysing complex heterogeneous biomedical data to predict adverse drug reactions, detect prescribing opportunities, and optimise dosing regimens. Overall, AIM-SAFE aims to help reduce adverse drug events, improve care quality, lower economic burden in healthcare, and integrate ethics into the research, development and application of the tools. Dedicated empirical and normative research on the ethical and social aspects of the project will accompany it throughout. In light of risks of environmental, privacy and explainability issues in AI development and big data health research, as well as risks of structural, epistemic and distributive injustices, central questions concern how to develop the innovations in AIM-SAFE responsibly - anticipating ethical issues early on, finding new solutions to mitigate them, and increasing the benefits for individuals and societies.