AI insurance: How Liability Insurance Can Drive the Responsible Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care

Despite enthusiasm about the potential to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine and health care delivery, adoption remains tepid, even for the most compelling technologies. In this article, the authors focus on one set of challenges to AI adoption: those related to liability. Well-designed AI liability insurance can mitigate predictable liability risks and uncertainties in a way that is aligned with the interests of health care’s main stakeholders, including patients, physicians, and health care organization leadership. A market for AI insurance will encourage the use of high-quality AI, because insurers will be most keen to underwrite those products that are demonstrably safe and effective. As such, well-designed AI insurance products are likely to reduce the uncertainty associated with liability risk for both manufacturers — including developers of software as a medical device — and clinician users and thereby increase innovation, competition, adoption, and trust in beneficial technological advances.