Data Provenance and Ethics in the Curricula of U.S. Health AI Education Programs

Abstract

Failures of deployed clinical artificial intelligence (AI) systems have often originated in how their training data were generated. Whether the programs that train the health AI workforce teach practitioners to examine data provenance is unknown. We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of the publicly advertised curricula of health AI education programs at U.S. universities, identified through a structured multisource web search between April and July 2026. Two investigators coded coverage of data provenance (structural, dataset limitations, or data management only), ethics, and sustainability; collaborative structure; technical prerequisites; and the disciplinary background and gender of named instructors. The primary outcome was provenance coverage at the structural or dataset-limitations level. Of 43 candidate entries, 36 programs at 25 institutional units in 21 universities were included. Ethics was covered by 29 programs (80.6%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 65.0 to 90.2), data provenance by 8 (22.2%; 95% CI, 11.7 to 38.1), and structural provenance by 6 (16.7%; 95% CI, 7.9 to 31.9). None of the seven master's degree programs met the primary outcome, and no program addressed sustainability. Eighteen programs included team-based work, but only 5 assembled teams across clinical and technical backgrounds. Of 92 named instructors, 76.1% came from computational disciplines and 3.3% from the social sciences or humanities; among the 51 whose gender could be determined, 66.7% were men. U.S. health AI education programs widely taught ethics but rarely taught how clinical data are produced. None addressed the environmental cost of computation, and most instructors came from computational disciplines.