Providing Care: Intrinsic Human–Machine Teams and Data

Despite the many successes of artificial intelligence in healthcare applications where human–machine teaming is an intrinsic characteristic of the environment, there is little work that proposes methods for adapting quantitative health data-features with human expertise insights. A method for incorporating qualitative expert perspectives in machine learning training data is proposed. The method implements an entropy-based consensus construct that minimizes the challenges of qualitative-scale data such that they can be combined with quantitative measures in a critical clinical event (CCE) vector. Specifically, the CCE vector minimizes the effects where (a) the sample size is too small, (b) the data may not be normally distributed, or (c) The data are from Likert scales, which are ordinal, so parametric statistics cannot be used. The incorporation of human perspectives in machine learning training data provides encoding of human considerations in the subsequent machine learning model. This encoding provides a basis for increasing explainability, understandability, and ultimately trust in AI-based clinical decision support system (CDSS), thereby improving human–machine teaming concerns. A discussion of applying the CCE vector in a CDSS regime and implications for machine learning are also presented.