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governanceChapter 3WHO · 2024

Autonomous Agents in Healthcare: Safety and Governance Requirements

Research Consortium (WHO Digital Health)

Abstract

We examine the safety and governance requirements for deploying autonomous AI agents in healthcare settings, covering clinical decision support, administrative automation, and patient-facing applications.

Eigenvector Insight — Zone III / PASF-PADE AnalysisNot part of the original paper
Eigenvector Research — Marco van Hurne
How this paper contributes to solving the Zone III problem (PASF-PADE)

Healthcare is the most safety-critical domain for Zone III deployment. The WHO governance framework provides the baseline requirements for any organization deploying autonomous agents in clinical or healthcare administrative contexts.

Why AI is not sufficient for Zone III without this

Zone III refers to high-complexity, high-risk, long-running agentic workflows — the class of enterprise AI deployments where a single failure can cascade across hundreds of steps. Standard AI models, trained to predict the next token, are not inherently designed for durable, governed, multi-step execution. This paper addresses one or more of the structural gaps that make Zone III deployments unsafe without explicit architectural intervention.

Key Contributions

  • →Healthcare AI governance framework
  • →Clinical safety requirements
  • →Patient safety protocols

Topics

healthcare AIsafetyclinical governancepatient safety