VA Suicide Prevention Algorithm REACH VET Reportedly Prioritizes Men Over Women Veterans

May 23, 2024

An AI program, REACH VET, developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for suicide prevention, allegedly prioritizes white men while overlooking female veterans and survivors of military sexual trauma. This flaw is concerning given rising suicide rates in these overlooked groups, demonstrating the importance of algorithmic fairness and consideration of all critical risk factors.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.658, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.658, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.1 — similarity 0.654, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: department-of-veterans-affairs-(va)
Alleged developer: department-of-veterans-affairs-(va)
Alleged harmed parties: veterans, survivors-of-military-sexual-trauma, female-veterans

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/699

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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