A former employee of Mayo Clinic is suing the health system after blowing the whistle on AI tools and review processes she claims put patient data at risk.
The lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court of Minnesota, alleges Mayo Clinic pushed out former Director of Research Operations Traci Tamiko Eto after she raised internal concerns about health system leaders’ efforts to circumvent a federally mandated research review process.
The filing details multiple instances of researchers at the health system failing to follow best practices for using patient data and obtaining informed consent.
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Eto also claims in the lawsuit that she sounded the alarm about leadership turning a blind eye to risks to data security caused by the adoption of new technologies.
One instance involved Mayo’s digital assistant tool, MAYA. Eto claimed in the lawsuit that the team tasked with developing the tool hid high error rates and used unsanctioned software in their work, creating a risk to secure data.
The filing also claims that leadership dismissed Eto’s concerns about a lack of review to de-identify patient records for the Mayo Clinic Platform, a data-sharing system for clinical research and the development of AI tools.
Eto claims that after she filed a report detailing her concerns with Mayo Clinic’s legal department, leadership retaliated against her and eventually eliminated her position.
Eto’s attorney did not respond to WPR’s request for comment.
A spokesperson for Mayo Clinic, which has locations across western Wisconsin, declined WPR’s interview request, saying the health system does not comment on active litigation.
In a statement, the spokesperson said Mayo is “committed to the responsible development and deployment of AI, with privacy, security, transparency and compliance embedded throughout our processes.”
The statement said the health system’s research and innovation efforts follow applicable laws and regulations, and that Mayo Clinic staff “remain steadfast in upholding the trust patients place in us and respecting their privacy.”
The lawsuit is not the first time an employee has challenged a company over the race to incorporate AI, said Ben Sobel, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
He pointed to two AI ethics leaders who claimed they were fired from Google in late 2020 and early 2021 after raising concerns about the company.
“Whether these are being worked out in court or they’re simply the topic of public scrutiny, there have been these high-profile disagreements between employees and employers when it comes to use of AI,” Sobel said.
What sets this new lawsuit against Mayo Clinic apart, Sobel said, is the legal argument that Eto’s work to ensure the health system was following a federally mandated process for reviewing research is protected by federal law.
“Ordinarily, if an employee has ethical reservations about how a company is pushing the adoption or progress of AI, they may not have that kind of an option,” he said.
Karola Kreitmair is an associate professor at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health whose work focuses on the future use of AI to treat patients. She said health care systems have an obligation to validate the safety of AI technology in the same way they evaluate other medical equipment before using it on patients.
“We would not use an MRI machine that we don’t have insurance that it’s safe and does the job it says. So it’s really the same for these AI technologies as well,” she said.
Kreitmair acknowledged that this process is more difficult for AI tools because the technology is constantly being updated and improved upon. To mitigate risks, she said the health care sector has moved toward adopting AI in the form of assistants or tools that are used by human providers rather than autonomous systems.
A particular problem presented by the use of large language models is the risk of being able to identify a patient from anonymized data used in clinical research.
“It’s actually becoming, because the AI systems are quite computationally powerful, more possible to sort of re-identify data points,” she said. “You can query it in some way, and you might be able to find out information about particular patients that you were not supposed to.”
She said AI technology presents a real opportunity to improve patient care. But health care systems are still working to figure out how to achieve that future while guarding against the potential for real harm due to the sensitive nature of health care.
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