An academic team at Stanford University worked with the County of Santa Clara Public Health Department to develop a machine-learning system for language matching in Covid-19 contact tracing through a collaborative design process. Although developed for a specific public health activity, the setting is representative of a wide range of health care delivery contexts, and the experience lays out how health care organizations can develop accountable algorithms that improve care, mitigate risk, and enable evaluation by stakeholders. Key elements of the design process involved: (1) a partnership and stakeholder consultation to develop a common understanding of and iteration around algorithmic design; (2) the use of a model understandable to all stakeholders, which exhibited only modest performance degradation relative to more complex models; and (3) a randomized controlled trial and qualitative survey of how the algorithm impacted real-world contact tracing, providing an evaluation that goes beyond narrow technical measures of algorithmic performance.
Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab