Peter Washington

Peter Washington is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation in UCSF’s Department of Medicine and principal investigator of the UCSF TECH Lab. His work focuses on human-centered AI, consumer and community digital health informatics, and AI-enabled digital diagnostics, therapeutics, and interventions using wearables, smartphones, and web technologies for mental health and neurological conditions.

AI Defaults Can Become Clinical Decisions in Digital Health

UCSF clinical informatics professor Peter Washington argues in a Stanford HCI seminar that AI-enabled digital health systems fail or succeed on decisions that often look like engineering defaults: metrics, thresholds, prompts, labels and workflow placement. Using examples from wearables, substance-use interventions, sepsis alerts, Apple Watch hypertension detection and Parkinson’s assessment, he makes the case that human-centered design is not a layer added after modeling, but part of how the model is trained, evaluated and made usable.

Stanford OnlineMay 20, 202616 min read