Cited by 117Ethics and Social Impacts of AIArtificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationExplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

A toolbox for surfacing health equity harms and biases in large language models

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Pfohl, Stephen R., Cole-Lewis, Heather, Sayres, Rory, Neal, Darlene, Asiedu, Mercy, Dieng, Awa, Tomasev, Nenad, Rashid, Qazi Mamunur +22 more·2024·Nature Medicine

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) hold promise to serve complex health information needs but also have the potential to introduce harm and exacerbate health disparities. Reliably evaluating equity-related model failures is a critical step toward developing systems that promote health equity. We present resources and methodologies for surfacing biases with potential to precipitate equity-related harms in long-form, LLM-generated answers to medical questions and conduct a large-scale empirical case study with the Med-PaLM 2 LLM. Our contributions include a multifactorial framework for human assessment of LLM-generated answers for biases and EquityMedQA, a collection of seven datasets enriched for adversarial queries. Both our human assessment framework and our dataset design process are grounded in an iterative participatory approach and review of Med-PaLM 2 answers. Through our empirical study, we find that our approach surfaces biases that may be missed by narrower evaluation approaches. Our experience underscores the importance of using diverse assessment methodologies and involving raters of varying backgrounds and expertise. While our approach is not sufficient to holistically assess whether the deployment of an artificial intelligence (AI) system promotes equitable health outcomes, we hope that it can be leveraged and built upon toward a shared goal of LLMs that promote accessible and equitable healthcare.

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  • Another subset of HealthBench data is from physician red teaming of large language models in health-related settings, designed to identify queries where models have weaknesses or do not respond appropriately.

    “Another subset of data in HealthBench is from physician red teaming of large language models in healthrelated settings, designed to identify queries where models have weaknesses or do not respond appropriately (Pfohl et al., 2024).”

    From HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health (2025) · cites this paper as Pfohl et al., 2024

    The Methods (EquityMedQA; no page available) describe human-written medical questions designed to target observed model failures, using responses that physicians had flagged as biased. The Results (EquityMedQA; no page available) call this a manual red-teaming dataset. Our copy does not establish that these questions became a subset of HealthBench, and it does not specify that physicians wrote the red-teaming questions. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Prior research has highlighted the risk of LLMs perpetuating societal biases, potentially leading to harm across patient groups.

    “Prior research has highlighted the risk of LLMs perpetuating societal biases, potentially leading to harm across patient groups.45, 46, 47, 48”
  • EquityMedQA introduces seven adversarial datasets and human evaluation rubrics to measure disparities across race, gender, and geography, revealing subtle inequities in LLM responses.

    “EquityMedQA introduces seven adversarial datasets and human evaluation rubrics to measure disparities across race, gender, and geography, revealing subtle inequities in LLM responses (Pfohl et al., 2024).”

    From Trustworthy Medical Question Answering: An Evaluation-Centric Survey (2025) · cites this paper as Pfohl et al., 2024

  • LLMs have demonstrated limited performance in clinical scenarios demanding flexible reasoning or information-seeking strategies.

    “LLMs have demonstrated limited performance in clinical scenarios demanding flexible reasoning or information-seeking strategies23,24.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. [41]Randolph, J. J. Free-marginal multirater kappa (multirater Kfree): an alternative to Fleiss’ fixed-marginal multirater kappa. In Joensuu Learning and Instruction Symposium (2005).
  2. [45]Homan, C. M. et al. Intersectionality in AI safety: using multilevel models to understand diverse perceptions of safety in conversational AI. In Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives) @ LREC-COLING 2024 (eds Abercrombie, G. et al.) 131–141 (2024).
  3. [48]Wang, D. et al. All that agrees is not gold: evaluating ground truth labels and dialogue content for safety. Preprint at Google Research https://research.google/pubs/all-that-agrees-is-not-gold-evaluating-ground-truth-labels-and-dialogue-content-for-safety (2023).
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Authors
Pfohl, S. R., Cole-Lewis, H., Sayres, R., Neal, D., Asiedu, M., Dieng, A., Tomasev, N., Rashid, Q. M., Azizi, S., Rostamzadeh, N., McCoy, L. G., Celi, L. A., Liu, Y., Schaekermann, M., Walton, A., Parrish, A., Nagpal, C., Singh, P., Dewitt, A., Mansfield, P., Prakash, S., Heller, K., Karthikesalingam, A., Semturs, C., Barral, J., Corrado, G., Matias, Y., Smith-Loud, J., Horn, I., & Singhal, K.
Affiliations
  • Google (United States) (US)
  • University of Alberta (CA)
  • Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (US)
Corresponding author
  • Pfohl, Stephen R.
  • Cole-Lewis, Heather
Venue
Nature Medicine
Published
2024-09-23
Volume
30
Issue
12
Pages
3590-3600
ISSN
  • 1078-8956 (ISSN-L)
  • 1546-170X
OpenAlex
W4402748869
Cited by
113
References
66
Citations by year
2026: 57 · 2025: 49 · 2024: 7
FWCI
46.83
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Medicine (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • This study was funded by Google LLC and/or subsidiary thereof (Google).
  • Google
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Keywords
large language models, health equity, algorithmic bias, health disparities, bias detection, human evaluation of AI, adversarial queries, participatory evaluation, health care equity
MeSH terms
Health Equity, Artificial Intelligence, Humans, Language, Bias, Healthcare Disparities

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