Demonstrating Trustworthiness to Patients in Data-Driven Health Care

Patient data is used to drive an ecosystem of advanced digital tools in health care, like predictive models or artificial intelligence-based decision support. Patients themselves, however, receive little information about these technologies or how they affect their care. This raises important questions about patient trust and continued engagement in a health care system that extracts their data but does not treat them as key stakeholders. This essay explores these tensions and provides steps forward for health systems as they design advanced health information-technology (IT) policies and practices. It centers patients, their concerns, and the ways they perceive trustworthiness to reframe advanced health IT in service of patient interests.