arXiv:2209.15111v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In earlier work we defined a qualitative notion of harm: either harm is caused, or it is not. For practical applications, we often need to quantify harm; for example, we may want to choose the least harmful of a set of possible interventions. In this work, which is an expanded version of an earlier conference paper, we develop a quantitative notion of harm. We first present a quantitative definition of harm in a deterministic context involving a single individual, then we consider the issues involved in dealing with uncertainty regarding the context and going from a notion of harm for a single individual to a notion of “societal harm”, which involves aggregating the harm to individuals. We show that the “obvious” way of doing this (just taking the expected harm for an individual and then summing the expected harm over all individuals) can lead to counterintuitive or inappropriate answers, and discuss alternatives, drawing on work from the decision-theory literature. Finally, we connect our work to a recent debate over harm within the context of precision medicine.
Digital health tools and point solutions—pitfalls in population health program measurement
Digital health tools are generally poorly regulated and often lack strong research evidence, posing challenges for purchasers of point solutions such as employer groups and