Digital Health Journal Club: Governing Federated Learning in Healthcare

In healthcare, federated learning (FL) is emerging as a methodology to enable the analysis of large and disparate datasets while allowing custodians to retain sovereignty. While FL minimises data-sharing challenges, concerns surrounding ethics, privacy, maleficent use, and harm remain.

These concerns can be managed by effective data governance. Data governance specifies procedural, relational, and structural mechanisms governing how data is captured, shared, and analysed, the resultant models and their use. However, limited insights exist on the optimal governance of this emerging technology.

This study aims to develop a consolidated framework of the data governance mechanisms for FL in healthcare. A scoping review was performed, using deductive and inductive analysis of 39 articles. The framework includes twelve procedural, ten relational, and twelve structural mechanisms. The framework directs researchers to examine how to enact each mechanism and provides practitioners with insights into the mechanism to consider when governing FL.

Bio

Dr Rebekah Eden is a senior researcher with the UQ Business School and Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC). She specialises in digital health and information systems. Her work focuses on understanding and improving digital health transformation through mixed-methods research, digital health maturity and impact assessments, and the development of data governance structures that support effective and appropriate system use. Her research aims to advance learning health system capability by evaluating digital health performance and identifying opportunities for improvement.

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