Trust—a small word, with big implications, particularly in today’s digital age, however, trust has been the foundation of the business world for many centuries. Whether it be debits and credits chiseled in stone, jotted down in ledgers, or entered into spreadsheets the world has trusted that recordings are correct, bills paid are marked accordingly, and the value ascribed to payment systems is agreed upon by all parties. We also trust that we get the goods and services that we pay for, in the condition that we expect them.
The digital age has brought an exponential growth in information and data sharing, much of it over the last 20 years without explicit consent. We shop or browse online without necessarily being aware of or understanding what data is being collected and how it is being used or shared. Few people truly understand that the business of social media sites is not providing a platform for people to share vacation photos or cat videos, it is the monetization of the data that is attached those activities. Rarely do people read the terms and conditions associated with online sites or services that they use, instead the click ‘I Accept’ without awareness of what they are consenting too. Further, it is often the case that if you don’t accept the terms and conditions you are denied access to the site or service. The role of trust in business relationships has rapidly expanded with this growth of data and information. Both businesses and consumers must pay far more attention to the construct of trust than they never have before.
As a commercial test publisher that has embarked on a multi-year digital transformation, Multi-Health Systems (MHS) has learned many lessons about the need to understand and apply the foundations of trust in their test development, deployment and sale processes. It is essential that we are seen as a trusted partner and to do this we decided that we need to be explicit in communicating our trust framework work in a clear and concise manner so that they understand and can make informed decisions when choosing digital assessments for their practice. In their day-to-day work Psychologists, like all professionals, use many commercial tools to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. From document creation and email tools to practice management and billing software. Increasingly these commercial tools include online platforms associated with psychological assessments, whether that be for administration, scoring or report generation. Increasingly, as more and more of the tools used by psychologists are delivered digitally, practitioners are asking question that reflect their desire to understand explicitly whether they and their clients can trust these sites. This often starts with whether or note the sites are secure from hackers or other people trying to steal data, then extends to questions around whether the data is free from corruption, whether the scoring algorithms are correct and secure from being manipulated or whether their data is being monetized, either by being sold to other companies or used for the ongoing development of the tools themselves. Finally, with growing awareness about the use of Artificial Intelligence in business systems our clients are concerned about how and where it is applied and whether the AI systems are fair, biased and trustworthy. MHS works with some of the most personal data of our customers and their clients. As our industry further adopts digital tools and services that have built in predictive algorithms and probabilistic artificial intelligence techniques, the importance of a trust framework is only amplified. To ensure that the entire organization understands the importance of the trust that our clients place in us and for the peace of mind for those clients and the families and individuals who place their trust in them, MHS has built a framework for trust that overarches all our organizational practices. Because trust is such a broad construct, we wanted to articulate our principles in a clear and concise way. The resulting framework is made up of Ethics, Accountability, Transparency, and Stewardship as the four pillars and drives everything we do in the development and commercialization of our psychological assessments and services.
Ethics
Ethics is a very broad philosophical construct and it took some time to create an ethical framework that worked for our business. In a nutshell, we commit to ensure that our use of data and the outcomes, predictions, prescriptions and actions we take based on data, will always be conducted in an ethical fashion, ensuring rigorous attention is paid to ensure bias (conscious and unconscious) is removed from our products and services, always with the interest of the individual and their community as the guiding factor. We have a four-pillar fairness, equity and bias reduction framework that governs the development of all our products and services. First, we aim to ensure that the constructs being measured are done so in a way that is fair and equitable and does not introduce bias into the measurement tool. Second, we ensure that the psychometric properties of the assessment reveal no bias in the performance of individual items, third we aim to ensure that the products and services are accessible across multiple technological platforms that meet the needs of a diverse range of users, and finally we build training and support materials to ensure that our products are used in an ethical manner by our customers.
Transparency
The second component of our trust framework is transparency. This is particularly important in the age of AI. At MHS we will be transparent in our actions, recommendations (be they prescribed or acted upon), and the methods through which a prescribed recommendation or action was arrived at will be traceable and open to 3rd party examination. Where intellectual property rights and stakeholder privacy requires opacity, we will preserve an immutable record of the “how and what” for future review and we will practice ‘qualified disclosure’ to allow those with appropriate credentials and training to view and evaluate our products and services.
Further, we have a separate AI governance framework that provides oversight to the adoption of AI tools in our products and services. It has been developed to specifically address the concerns around Generative AI, but can also be applied in the case of both symbolic and probabilistic AI, particularly if those tools are new and untested.
Data Stewardship
As stewards of confidential and sensitive data, MHS will ensure the intention, method (process and practice), and outcome(s) of each data use, abiding by the laws of each country we do business within. Where national laws of origin, process, and transaction vary, we will work to the most stringent of the options to ensure clear and consistent use of data in all cases. To this end we have invested heavily in compliance certifications such as ISO 27001, GDPR, COPPA, FERPA, SOC 2 etc. These investments are a significant and important part of our desire to ensure that our practitioners can trust that we are not just saying we take our security and privacy responsibilities seriously and we run our business in a safe and compliant manner.
Accountability
Organizations are made up of individuals with various levels of loyalty, even in the best companies. Without a requirement for both individual and organizational accountability even the most comprehensive of governance frameworks fail. At MHS we work to ensure that across our organization we are responsible for our actions and the custodianship of the data we are entrusted with. We will be accountable to our customers, partners, operating jurisdictions, and shareholders to maintain a legal, ethical, compliant and accountable business through the actions of our entire workforce.
We believe that this framework, developed over several years of digital transformation, will help us build and maintain the trust that is so important to our business. We encourage everyone to take the time to ask questions of those that provide tools and services, to understand what controls are in place and what compliance governance regulations the organizations adhere to. What internal values and practices they have adopted to ensure their team members hold up those standards. There are many companies in this world that have shown us the implicit trust we used to extend in commercial relationships should not be taken for granted. Trust in a digital age should be explicit and informed. After all, once broken trust is difficult to regain and there is too much riding on our digital world to take trust for granted.