APA 7th format. You are representing the defendant in the following case, answer the following issue evaluation questions:
Based upon this evaluation, what went wrong? (Where did the problem happen? How could the situation have been avoided? Be specific as to the steps the defendants could have taken to avoid the issues.)
If you are a manager tasked to tackle this issue, what would you recommend? (What recommendations would you make to ensure this situation does not happen in the future? Be specific and state the actual corporate policies you would implement to avoid any problems of this nature occurring at your company. State with specificity how you would implement those corporate policies.)
Case:
Wellness Medical Services employs 35 mental health counselors who work remotely at home offering their mental health services to clients throughout the greater Tampa Bay region. They meet with clients through a secure application that allows for both voice and video chat. Due to their small to medium business size they decided it would be more practical to look for a third-party note-taking solution.
HumanSoft is a tech Startup company from California who employs 20 AI engineers who have created a program called “SpeakPad”, which utilizes a large data AI model to record speech and translate it into text. The program allows for multiple languages and organizes notes based on case files. Mental health providers are able to use shorthand notes and speak them into the AI program.
The CEO of Wellness Medical has decided to employ a “High Security” business account due to a lack of direct IT support from within Wellness Medical. This allowed Wellness Medical employees free usage of the AI model service. WMS was led to believe that SpeakPad was safe for them to use, as their website described the program as “completely secure solution”, and their terms of service only mentioned the recording of speech would be used for the program itself, or for playback by the user or a WMS administrator to review certain cases or notes on cases. There was also an agreement that mental health counselors would be able to share file details with other WMS counselors in the case that a patient was seeking a different counselor.
Three months after WMS began using SpeakPad, HS began expanding its AI’s training data with user recordings. While WMS’s data had several extra security precautions taken in its storage due to their purchase of the security plan, a significant amount of these recordings were added to the training data for SpeakPad. The data contained patient information including names and details that were not excluded from the training information. This would lead to WMS being faced with lawsuits and fines due to HIPPA violations.
HumanSoft claims that within the terms of service agreement between HumanSoft and Wellness Medical Services that Wellness Medical was informed that notes may be used to train AI in the future and Wellness Medical should have taken this into account when using real patient’s names in the notes and potential training data.
Wellness Medical Services claims that HumanSoft expanding its training into known case files is a violation of HIPPA and should never have been done. There was also no forewarning about this expansion which could have allowed counselors at WMS to change names or take precautions to prevent the violations.
