Phases: an ethics committee to govern artificial intelligence

In Italia, digital health expenditure has reached almost three billion euros by 2025 and GenAI is already being used by a growing proportion of health professionals. Numbers that confirm the need for a clear governance of innovation, as also recalled by the World Health Organisation: AI can help to improve services and read health needs, but requires ethical criteria, transparency, human control and data security.

This is why Fasi, the Supplementary Healthcare Fund for company managers, set up by Confindustria and Federmanager, has established an Ethics Committee on AI, which was presented in Rome at the Pontifical Antonianum University, during the seminar 'Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Fasi's projects'. It is a steering and guarantee body, not a formal body, designed to accompany the Fund's projects in the field of healthcare innovation and to define criteria, limits and responsibilities in the use of new technologies. This is also in line with the choice recalled by Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to place artificial intelligence within a framework of shared responsibility, so that healthcare innovation remains a tool at the service of the person, mutuality and the real needs of the assisted without ever reducing the individual to a sequence of data, services or predictive profiles.

"The setting up of the Ethics Committee on Artificial Intelligence was not a formal fulfilment for Fasi, but a choice of responsibility," explained Fasi chairman Daniele Damele. At a time when the Fund began to deal with technologies capable of affecting healthcare processes, data, and the reading of health needs, we felt it necessary to provide ourselves with a place for guidance, evaluation, and assurance. AI can offer extraordinary tools, but it must be governed within clear conditions, limits, and criteria, so that it remains consistent with the Fund's founding values: mutuality, solidarity, protection of the dignity of the person, and the centrality of the human being'.

Fabio Pengo, Vice-President of the Fasi, on the other hand, recalled the operational value of the path initiated by the Fund. "The Ethical Guidelines we have drawn up represent an essential tool," he emphasised, "They are not a theoretical exercise, but an operational compass to accompany technological innovation within a framework of shared principles. Our goal is to build a governance of AI that is truly human, responsible and sustainable, capable of putting technology at the service of the person and not the person at the service of technology'.

The seminar brought together academics, experts in bioengineering, psychology, law, philosophy and artificial intelligence, together with representatives of Confindustria and Federmanager. The meeting represented the first public moment of discussion on the path undertaken by the Fund to integrate AI into its projects in a responsible, transparent manner, consistent with the mutualistic nature of Fasi.