Worcester Business Journal

14 Worcester Business Journal | January 26, 2026 | wbjournal.com BY MICA KANNER-MASCOLO WBJ Staff Writer A decade aer the beginning of the AI boom of the 2010s, artificial intelligence has not only been integrat- ed in our homes, our jobs, and our phones, but our health care. at can bring about a lot of concern, said Dr. David McManus, chair and professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester. AI can now step in to assist with diagnosing, predicting health outcomes, hospital triage, and more. ese tools must be void of biases and discriminatory practices, McMa- nus said. Enter UMass Chan's AI Assurance Lab, a novel initiative established in April to test the ethical use of AI in health care. By deploying and studying the impacts of AI tools across different healthcare providers and patient subgroups, the AI Assurance lab is working to add the human back into artificial intelligence. "We wanted to ensure that in trying to do something good, we didn't exacerbate health disparities further by training a model that might, without realizing it, be prejudiced in some way," said McManus. McManus and Dr. Adrian Zai, UMass Chan's chief research informatics officer, co-lead the Assurance Lab, where healthcare businesses test their AI tools for real-world efficacy and equity. "Even if the overall accuracy appears strong, it doesn't mean that [the AI] is performing in a fair approach," said Zai. "Ethical concern is usually created by unequal impact, not just statistical differences." Stress testing AI "One of the biggest miscon- ceptions about healthcare AI is that good performance of a model throughout the development process does … guarantee good performance in the real world," said Zai. e lab works with companies to containerize their AI, bringing the new technology into the lab's testing facility. rough analyzing AI tools, the Assur- ance Lab looks for safety, reliability, and the potential for errors causing patient harm. e lab conducts stress testing, evaluating performance and capabilities under hypothetical, extreme conditions. "We evaluate whether clinicians actually understand and appropriately contextualize the outputs," Zai said. If the results produced by an AI tool aren't transparent or obvious to provid- ers, that creates an ethical risk, especially when the AI is used to inform care decision making, he said. e lab oen uses real-word data from the UMass Memorial Health sys- tem hospitals in Central Massachusetts. In one case, Zai and McManus built a database with millions of digitized EKG results from racially diverse patients being treated at UMass, to test the performance of an AI tool designed to predict cardiovascular complications in pregnant women. Unintended consequences e AI Assurance Lab runs tests through UMass Chan's interprofession- Making sure AI works UMass Chan's new AI Assurance Lab tests developing healthcare tech, so it functions properly in the real world Dr. Adrian Zai, co-lead of the AI Assurance Lab Dr. David McManus, co-lead the AI Assurance Lab F O C U S ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

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