Saskia Kaltenbrunner researches legal and ethical aspects of innovation and digitalisation processes from an interdisciplinary perspective. She focuses in particular on health data and the use of AI in healthcare, and is involved in several third-party funded projects in this field. Saskia is additionally writing her PhD in Political Science on digital healthcare legal frameworks, policies and practices.

Saskia obtained her BA in Liberal Arts and Social Justice from the University of Warwick, and her MRes in Risk and Disaster Reduction from University College London. Her background is interdisciplinary, with a focus on human rights research and risk management. Before joining the team, Saskia has worked at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights and at the Forum Journalismus und Medien Wien (fjum).

"Patients, healthcare professionals, AI: shared decision-making?"

Saskia’s doctoral research explores clinical decision-making with the use of AI-based tools. Decisions on patient care, usually made by healthcare professionals and discussed with patients, increasingly incorporate recommendations made by AI-based systems. This project explores, in a first step, to what extent healthcare professionals and patients must be informed of and understand the recommendations they are presented with. For this legal analysis, the starting point are transparency and human oversight requirements stemming from the AI Act. In a second step, this project explores two case studies, in which AI is used in a hospital-setting. Practical challenges in implementing transparency and human oversight are contrasted with emerging legal requirements.