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Exploring the Ethical and Practical Considerations of Artificial Intelligence in Real World Healthcare Settings: Stakeholder Focus Group Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to transform how we research human disease, diagnose and treat patients, and operate hospitals. However, emerging ethical dilemmas surrounding their design, use, and oversight demand both policy attention and empirical research.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore current AI development, integration, and use activities and identify emerging ethical priorities across the Texas Medical Center (TMC), the largest medical center in the world.
Methods:
Three qualitative focus groups were conducted via Zoom between May and June 2025 to gauge the perspectives of N=19 clinicians, developers, administrators, and patient advocates on core aspects of clinical AI in healthcare.
Results:
Experts noted that while AI is currently being used to extend clinical expertise and enhance workflow efficiency, there are significant barriers accessing quality datasets for training, insufficient governance on the use of AI tools in the clinic, and limited patient involvement in AI development decisions. These concerns were heightened for practitioners working in safety net hospitals and in other under-resourced healthcare settings. Clinicians and patient advocates also differed in their views on patient notification about the use of AI at the point of care, justifying future research on this question.
Conclusions:
Our findings offer a useful case study for how large, academic medical centers currently leverage AI technologies to improve patient care, and where to focus education and training efforts to further build AI literacy among patients, providers and administrators in the future.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.