Predicting and Characterizing Legal Claims of Hospitals with Computational Intelligence: the Legal and Ethical Implications

In this paper we propose a fuzzy logic-based approach to analyze UK National Health Service (NHS) public administrative data related to pre- and post-pandemic claims filed by patients, analyzing the legal and ethical issues connected to the use of Artificial Intelligence systems, including our own, to take critical decisions having a significant impact on patients, such as employing computational intelligence to justify the management choices related to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed allocation. Differently from previous papers, in this work we follow an unsupervised approach and, specifically, we perform an analysis of UK hospitals by means of a computational intelligence algorithm integrating Fuzzy C- Means and swarm intelligence. The dataset that we analyse allows us to compare pre- and post-pandemic data, to analyze the ethical and legal challenges of the use of computational intelligence for critical decision-making in the health care field.