The Centre of Regulatory Excellence (CoRE) has been collaborating with the Health Regulation Group of the Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore since April 2022 aiming to advance Singapore as a regional thought leader in healthcare service regulation.
As part of this collaboration, CoRE held the first Roundtable for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Governance in Healthcare Sector with MOH on 4 April 2024; a key area under CoRE’s 10th Anniversary theme, “Regulating the Future of Health”.
The 40 invited local and international experts from the public sector, medicine, law, industry, academia, bioethics, and patient organisations examined the evolving approaches, options, and issues for regulating AI in healthcare globally and in Singapore. AI use cases shared from Singapore’s public and private healthcare sectors helped ground discussions in real world experiences and stimulated thinking on potential ways forward. The group also considered under-researched domains of healthcare AI governance and how trends could inform regulatory priorities.
Several significant matters were surfaced, including outcomes and adaptive regulation, harmonisation and reliance, early incorporation of user and patient inputs, data quality and integrity, transparency and interpretability, ethical and legal compliance, accountability and liability, equity and justice, and deployment options - to name a few!
Following from incredibly rich discussions with valuable perspectives and fresh insights and recognising that AI regulation across different domains is still nascent, we posed the key question “Is a separate governance framework for AI in Healthcare needed?” - to which a significant majority answered yes. To dive deeper into what is realistically required to appropriately address the range of issues, a follow up session will be held later this year.
