Abstract
Abstract
AI is increasingly embedded in the institutions and environments that shape health. Yet current frameworks for understanding its implications for health equity remain underdeveloped. The social determinants of health tradition provides a strong foundation, and recent work on digital determinants of health has begun to address the health implications of digital transformation. However, AI warrants distinct conceptual attention because of its triple role: it operates simultaneously as a determinant of health in its own right, as a mediator and moderator of existing determinants, and as an amplifier of advantage and disadvantage over time. This viewpoint proposes a redistribution-translation-accumulation framework for analyzing how AI may contribute to the reproduction of health inequity. The framework comprises 2 analytically distinct mechanisms and 1 cross-cutting temporal dynamic. Redistribution captures how AI reshapes the distribution of health-relevant resources and opportunities, including education, employment, and income, while AI itself becomes an unequally distributed determinant. Translation describes how AI changes the pathways through which social positions are converted into health outcomes. Proxy-based decision rules can formalize historical inequities, diagnostic algorithms may perform unevenly across populations due to unrepresentative training data, and AI-mediated information environments can alter institutional responsiveness. Accumulation is conceptualized not as a third parallel mechanism but as a temporal amplifier operating on both mechanisms: AI-driven feedback loops and institutional embedding can concentrate advantage and disadvantage over time, often without users’ awareness. The framework is offered as a hypothesis-generating heuristic and is directionally neutral: under specifiable design, deployment, and governance conditions, the same mechanisms can narrow rather than widen health gaps in high-income and low- and middle-income settings alike. The framework has direct implications for governance. Current approaches such as the EU AI Act’s Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) and Canada’s Algorithmic Impact Assessment (AIA) advance AI accountability but assess systems largely before or at deployment and do not systematically track distributional health consequences. Building on this framework, I propose a distributional impact assessment as a complementary tool for equity-oriented AI governance. Structured around the 3 RTA dimensions, it asks whether an AI system alters the distribution of health-relevant resources across groups (redistribution), changes how social positions are converted into health (translation), and risks concentrating disadvantage over time through feedback and institutional embedding (accumulation). It is operationalized with candidate indicators, data sources, responsible actors, and reassessment triggers and is illustrated through a retrospective worked example of a biased care-management algorithm.