Medical artificial intelligence and the right to health

The international human right to health states that people have claims to access goods, services, and infrastructure that protects an adequate standard of health. The current and forthcoming advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which significantly improve the quality and efficacy of medical care, could raise the current standard of healthcare owed under the right to health. In this paper, we identify three duties owed under the right to health and describe ways in which AI can uniquely or more efficiently fulfill these duties, namely the duties to provide: access to good quality care that effectively improves patient health; equitable access to healthcare for all persons; and novel healthcare services that can only be achievable by medical AI. This paper will also consider some potential objections to our claim such as whether medical AI may undermine, rather than fulfil, the social determinants of health. We conclude that if medical AI can partially fulfil the right to health through increasing access and quality of healthcare, and if providing medical AI can be balanced against other obligations and rights, states will have corresponding duties to not unnecessarily restrict AI innovation through regulation and may even be required to invest in medical AI infrastructure to meet the right to health of their populations.