Rebecca Robins and Erin Brodwin:

Since February of last year, tens of thousands of patients hospitalized at one of Minnesota’s largest health systems have had their discharge planning decisions informed with help from an artificial intelligence model. But few if any of those patients has any idea about the AI involved in their care.

That’s because frontline clinicians at M Health Fairview generally don’t mention the AI whirring behind the scenes in their conversations with patients.

At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools — many of them unproven — to help predict whether hospitalized patients are likely to develop complications or deteriorate, whether they’re at risk of readmission, and whether they’re likely to die soon. But these patients and their family members are often not informed about or asked to consent to the use of these tools in their care, a STAT examination has found.