🔗 linkedin.com/in/jenniferjstockton

Research Focus: AI Governance • Individualized Medicine • Healthcare Policy

“Governing Artificial Intelligence in Individualized Medicine: Partnerships, Distributed Authority, and the Construction of Governance in Practice”

What challenge did your research address?

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly in individualized medicine, shaping decisions about diagnosis, treatment, and patient care, but the systems meant to govern it haven’t kept pace. Responsibility is scattered across regulators, healthcare organizations, technology companies, clinicians, and standards bodies, with no single entity accountable across the full AI lifecycle. My research examines what happens in the spaces between those organizations, and finds that governance isn’t absent so much as fragmented: carried out through a patchwork of formal regulation, voluntary frameworks, contracts, and cross-sector partnerships that can be hard to trace once something goes wrong.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

I’ve spent much of my career at the intersection of technology, healthcare, and business, and I kept coming back to a question technology alone couldn’t answer: how do we make sure innovation moves forward while the systems of law, policy, and accountability around it keep up? I went into this research expecting to focus on regulatory gaps. What I found was more interesting: governance was already happening, just often outside traditional regulatory structures, through organizations, contracts, and partnerships operating in the space between formal authority and real-world practice.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

My research shows that fragmented authority doesn’t mean AI is ungoverned. Governance is increasingly distributed across regulators, healthcare organizations, technology companies, and standards bodies, with cross-sector partnerships functioning as real governance infrastructure that helps organizations coordinate expertise and adapt faster than formal regulation alone allows. But as governance becomes more distributed, accountability can become harder to locate, especially after a system is deployed and interacting with real clinical environments. Rather than asking only whether we need more regulation, my work offers a model for deliberately designing the relationships and accountability mechanisms that already govern AI in practice, supporting innovation while strengthening patient safety and public trust.

“Cross-sector partnerships function as real governance infrastructure that helps organizations coordinate expertise and adapt faster than formal regulation alone allows.”

Jennifer Stockton