Algoricum

A hospital I spoke with recently tested an AI tool to flag high-risk patients.

One day, it flagged a perfectly healthy patient as needing immediate ICU admission.

The doctors were confused.
• Vitals? Normal.
• Labs? Unremarkable.
• Symptoms? None.

So they did what any rational clinician would do: They asked why.

And AI? It had nothing to say.

No reasoning. No breakdown. Just a black-box decision.

Turns out, the model had been trained on billing codes instead of clinical markers.

Since this patient had a history of expensive treatments, AI assumed they must be critically ill.

That’s the problem with AI in healthcare right now.

It’s confident but not always correct.

And if doctors can’t question its logic, then what’s the point?

What needs to change?
✅ AI must be able to explain itself - no more “just trust the algorithm.”
✅ Hospitals and clinics need to question how AI reaches decisions before trusting them.
✅ AI isn’t replacing human judgment; it should be enhancing it.

Would you trust an AI that can’t explain its decisions?