Availity Issues Statement of Principles on AI in Healthcare

Jacksonville, FL — February 20, 2024 — Availity, the nation’s largest real-time health information network, issued the company’s Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) Principles.

The principles represent Availity’s commitment to the development, integration, and deployment of AI-powered tools to maximize meaningful and beneficial use in the delivery of healthcare.

Developed with broad and collaborative contribution, buy-in, and advocacy across Availity business units, the AI policy builds upon internationally recognized standards and applied lessons learned from industry leaders.

The guiding principles of Availity’s Responsible AI Policy include:

• Safety first: Availity continues to apply strong safety and security practices to reduce risks of harm to clients, users, and other individuals served, building resilience into its AI systems, and establishing proper safeguards to decrease the potential for inappropriate influences.
• Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias: To minimize any known biases in data, Availity strives to design AI systems with fair and equitable objectives and is committed to monitoring the outputs accordingly.
• Honor privacy and confidentiality of Availity clients and patients: In addition to adherence to HIPAA Security and Privacy Rule policies, Availity will respect data use rights agreements, adopts architectures with privacy safeguards, and provides appropriate transparency and control over the use of data.
• Lead with accountability, transparency, and observability: Availity is committed to transparency in the AI development process and observability of AI system outputs. Availity will endeavor to document what data was used in developing the system and the metrics by which the AI was evaluated (model provenance), explain how the data was used to produce the systems’ recommendations (model observability), and continuously assess the AI for proper functioning within the context and use case for which it was designed (model monitoring).
• Research, learn and iterate: To ensure scientific rigor and integrity, Availity will continuously improve its solutions, applying a systematic risk management approach through monitoring and analyzing AI system behavior throughout its lifecycle, including gathering feedback from end-users, applying human-in-the-loop audits, and adjusting or retraining systems to ensure fairness, context appropriateness, and security.

“At Availity, we believe that AI holds the potential to improve patient outcomes, enhance administrative efficiencies, lower healthcare costs, and spark innovations across the healthcare industry; however, implementing meaningful change will require a collaborative effort between AI developers, healthcare professionals, and regulatory bodies to create AI technologies that are accountable, transferable, and traceable,” said Russ Thomas, CEO of Availity. “Our Responsible AI Policy is a testament to achieving this end. By ensuring responsible and ethical training and maintenance of our AI systems, we can enhance the products and services we provide to our clients and deliver transformational improvements through ethical and responsible AI—making it easier for health plans and providers to collaborate and share data.”

For additional information, download Availity’s Responsible AI Policy.

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About Availity

Availity is the trusted partner for organizations seeking to realize the greatest value from clinical, administrative, and financial data. Positioned at the nexus of provider, health plan, and consumer health information, Availity develops scalable, innovative solutions for healthcare data acquisition, standardization, transparency, automation, and exchange among health plans, providers, and technology partners. As one of the nation’s largest health information networks, Availity facilitates billions of clinical, administrative, and financial transactions annually. Our suite of dynamic products, built on a powerful, intelligent platform, enables real-time collaboration for success in a competitive, value-based care environment.  

For more information, including an online demonstration, please visit www.availity.com or call 1.800.AVAILITY (282.4548). Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Media Contacts:

Matt Schlossberg
Director of Public Relations, Availity
630-935-9136
[email protected]

Jill Colna / Jill Anderson 
SVM PR 
401-490-9700
[email protected]