SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Medical Sociology
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1536389
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Health and Medical AI: Participatory Governance, Algorithmic Fairness and Social JusticeView all 5 articles
Ethical Issues Raised by Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Population Health: A Scoping Review Authors
Provisionally accepted
- 1Laval University, Quebec, Canada
- 2Montreal University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- 3Sciences Po, Paris, France
- 4Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
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Artificial intelligence systems (AIS) powered by big data (BD) are more and more common in the healthcare sector and many anticipate that they will have a substantial effect on population health. Facing the disruptive potential of these transformations, there is a need to keep the pace with the ethical reflection accompanying the uses of AIS and the BD systems enabling such innovations. To carry out this task, we conducted a scoping review of the ethical issues of AIS and BD, in population health, based on 243 scholarly articles. Our results show the explosion of publications on the subject in recent years. Our qualitative analysis of this literature highlights the potential issues of AIS and BD on the three components of population health: (1) the health outcomes and their distribution in the population and between populations; (2) the patterns of health determinants; (3) the policies and interventions developed to connect the previous components. Our conclusions show the uncertainty of the positive outcomes of these technologies and their potential for unequal distribution. Authors consider that AIS and BD will affect determinants of health either in their understanding and by transforming the structure of these determinants. At last, this review points that the policies and interventions developed to attain population health goals will have to answer to numerous ethical expectations. This review offers a comprehensive mapping of ethical issues raised by the uses of AIS in the global field of population health.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, big data, Ethics, population health, Public Health
Received: 28 Nov 2024; Accepted: 18 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Couture, Roy, Dez, Tremblay and Bélisle-Pipon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Vincent Couture, Laval University, Quebec, Canada
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