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Is the UK's liver transplant matching algorithm biased against younger patients?

Seemingly minor technical decisions can have life-or-death effects

The health system needs to make efficient and ethical use of a very limited and valuable resource, and must find some principled way of allocating it to many deserving people, all of whom have reasonable claims for why they should be entitled to it. The fact that the system isn’t very good at meeting its stated objectives only seems to have been reported a decade after the algorithm was developed (although in retrospect, there were clear signals in the results of the simulations that were run before deployment). We’ve previously explained in this newsletter that bad outcomes result when public sector agencies outsource algorithmic decision making systems to opaque, profit-oriented companies.

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