Episode 25 · United Kingdom
How to develop AI that addresses health inequities
Joe Alderman · NHS Anaesthetist and NIHR Clinical Lecturer in AI, University of Birmingham
Mar 2026
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About this episode
Joe Alderman has a rare double view: anaesthetist by night, AI academic by day. His insights on what it takes to deploy and monitor AI in healthcare - with a lens on not leaving people behind - are relevant wherever in the world you are. We cover health data poverty, the STANDING Together initiative, algorithmic bias, LLM safety for patients and clinicians, anti-patterns in the industry, and what people building in low-resource settings specifically need to think about.
“We're starting with the dataset or the technology we happen to have, instead of working backwards from what we are fundamentally trying to achieve in the world.”
Joe Alderman
What we cover
- 01We're starting with the dataset or the technology we happen to have, instead of working backwards from what we're fundamentally trying to achieve
- 02Health data poverty and the inverse care law: how algorithmic healthcare can amplify existing inequities
- 03The STANDING Together initiative: where things are now, two years on from episode 1
- 04In the UK, life expectancy is falling in some areas. Health inequalities are rising. This is not a tech deficiency problem - it's a whole society problem
- 05What a responsible development team can do starting tomorrow to be more proactive about underserved communities
- 06Algorithmic bias: systematic errors are more dangerous than human errors because they scale to millions in one morning
- 07The regulation of LLMs for healthcare: why it's harder than for narrow AI, and what the MHRA's AI Commission is working on
- 08How patients and clinicians can think more critically about which tasks to use Gen AI for, and how to think about safety and liability
- 09The Health Chatbot Users' Guide: building tools to help lay people navigate this new world
- 10Why the risk-benefit calculation inverts in low-resource settings - and why that doesn't remove the responsibility to do good engineering
About the guest
Joe Alderman
NHS Anaesthetist and NIHR Clinical Lecturer in AI, University of Birmingham
Joe Alderman is an NHS anaesthetist in Birmingham and an NIHR Clinical Lecturer (assistant professor) in AI and digital health at the University of Birmingham. He leads mixed-methods research and policy engagement on getting the most from AI in healthcare - including the STANDING Together initiative on health data poverty and algorithmic bias. He recently founded an international initiative to build the Health Chatbot Users' Guide, providing practical guidance for patients using LLMs to manage their own health.
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Transcript
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