Medicine has adopted artificial intelligence faster than it has learned to account for it. Provenance, consent, authorization, responsibility: these are questions answered rigorously everywhere else in clinical practice, yet they become largely unanswerable once data leave the institution that produced them. That gap is what brings Katrin Hoffmann to ZIBR as a Research Fellow.
Katrin is a habilitated academic physician, trained in visceral surgery, with a research record in translational oncology and years of executive responsibility for the medical strategy of a Swiss multi-site university hospital group. Her work has moved over the past decade from the operating theater toward the structural conditions that determine whether data-driven care is possible at all: digital and data strategy, AI governance, and the reconciliation of medical accountability with regulatory and economic constraints.
At ZIBR, she will be developing a health-related research agenda around two connected questions:
Verifiable Governance and Accountability in AI-Driven Medicine Katrin wants to explore how blockchain and distributed ledger technology can support verifiable governance, data provenance, digital identity, and attributable accountability in AI-driven medicine.
Sovereignty over Health Data Data security and sovereignty are the pivot on which much of this turns. Sovereignty over health data operates at three levels at once: the patient, whose consent ought to be a durable and revocable relationship rather than a single signature; the institution, which remains answerable for data it may no longer hold; and the country, in decisions about where health data reside and on what terms they may be reused. Katrin has come to think of the alternative as the problem of accountable health-data ecosystems — infrastructures in which security, consent, and responsibility are demonstrable properties rather than contractual commitments.
