HEAL: a 4-step framework and metric to assess health equity of ML-based health tools
Google researchers (Schaekermann and Horn) propose HEAL, a four‑step framework and accompanying HEAL metric to quantify whether machine‑learning health technologies prioritize performance for populations with worse pre‑existing health outcomes. The paper—published in The Lancet eClinicalMedicine—defines steps to identify equity‑relevant factors and metrics, quantify pre‑existing disparities, measure model performance across subpopulations, and compute how anticorrelated performance is with health disparities; a dermatology CNN trained on ~29k cases (288 conditions) is presented as an illustrative case study.