South Carolina Launches Training Program for Data Scientists to Address Health Inequities

The National Library of Medicine awarded $1.2 million to researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and Clemson University to establish a training program for data scientists on health inequities.

The program, SC BIDS4HEALTH, will recruit individuals from the Medical University of South Carolina and Clemson University’s joint biomedical data science and informatics program, as well as from historically Black colleges and universities statewide.

In South Carolina, 43 of its 46 counties are designated as fully or partially medically underserved areas, according to 2020 data from MUSC researchers. 

Each year, the SC BIDS4HEALTH training program will recruit three predoctoral students and two postdoctoral students to receive training on issues like lack of diversity in STEM fields. 

While artificial intelligence can benefit health care, the training program will also emphasize the potential harms of AI and the accuracy of algorithms, which depend on the quality of data used. 

“If you have a smart medical decision-making system that’s trained on data and the training data doesn’t represent the population in the right way, then the actual output of the decision-making system can actually create bias,” said Brian Dean, professor in the School of Computing at Clemson and co-director of the training program, in a written statement.

After the program, trainees will begin teaching data science undergraduates at South Carolina State University. The trainees will also work with local groups in their communities to use data science to address health inequities and chronic diseases, such as using AI to predict when approaches to addressing chronic disease inequities are most likely to succeed. 

Alexa can be reached at [email protected]