SB 1249, An Act Addressing Innovations In Artificial Intelligence

TESTIMONY OF CONNECTICUT HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GENERAL LAW COMMITTEE

Friday, February 14, 2025

The Connecticut Hospital Association (CHA) appreciates this opportunity to submit testimony concerning SB 1249, An Act Addressing Innovations In Artificial Intelligence. CHA supports the bill.

Connecticut hospitals and health systems care for patients, strengthen the state’s economy, and support vulnerable communities across the state. Every day, they work to improve healthcare access, affordability, and health equity. Even as they face ongoing challenges, hospitals provide world-class care to everyone who walks through their doors, regardless of their ability to pay. Hospitals also support an exemplary workforce as the largest collective employer in the state, contribute significantly to the state’s economy, and invest in their communities addressing social drivers of health.

SB 1249 seeks to promote the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Connecticut through supporting innovation, investment, and exploration in a manner that both recognizes the need to avoid hidden potential risks of AI discrimination and appreciates the importance of limiting uses of government held data to best protect privacy rights.

CHA appreciates the balance that SB 1249 strikes between exploring the potential for AI while avoiding overregulation. The bill embraces the need to foster innovation and focus on forward-looking exploration of AI development and deployment while simultaneously embedding necessary controls on governmental uses to protect the public privacy and individual rights, provides a check on potential hidden flaws in AI that could be used to disguise insidious discriminatory intent, and avoids unnecessary barriers to AI use.

The AI journey in healthcare began decades ago, as researchers and clinicians explored the myriad uses of machine learning and the value of algorithmic tools in improving healthcare and patient experiences. An industry-wide adoption of AI-type tools in healthcare was significantly accelerated starting in July 2010 when the HITECH Act rules for the “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program” (better known to most as “Meaningful Use”), first required computerized tools for basic clinical decision support (CDS) as a functioning component in hospitals’ certified electronic health record technology or EMR systems. AI is now inextricably woven into both clinical and administrative aspects of how healthcare is successfully delivered.

Patients benefit from AI uses every day, including through better accuracy on imaging findings, by detection of conditions and diseases at a pace far faster than humans alone can accomplish, through parsing of quality improvement and patient safety data and measures, and through highly sophisticated clinical decision support tools that function at a level barely dreamed of when the first mandates were published in 2010. There are also key administrative uses such as tracking supply and inventory to ensure efficiencies, assisting in insurance claims management, extrapolating financial data for better long-term planning, optimizing patient scheduling and reducing wait times, and informing staffing needs. Healthcare today could not function without AI and machine learning.

We support SB 1249 because it balances the need to keep moving forward with core protections that are appropriately tailored to avoid unnecessary interference with current uses or innovation of AI that might otherwise result from overregulation.

Thank you for your consideration of our position. For additional information, contact CHA Government Relations at (203) 294-7301.