Now You See Me: Designing Responsible AI Dashboards for Early-Stage Health Innovation

Innovative HealthTech teams develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in contexts where ethical expectations and organizational priorities must be balanced under severe resource constraints. While Responsible AI practices are expected to guide the design and evaluation of such systems, they frequently remain abstract or poorly aligned with the operational realities of early-stage innovation. At the ecosystem level, this misalignment disproportionately affects disadvantaged projects and founders, therefore limiting the diversity of problem-areas under consideration, solutions, stakeholder perspectives, and population datasets represented in AI-enabled healthcare systems. Visualization provides a practical mechanism for supporting decision-making across the AI lifecycle. When developed via a rigorous and collaborative design process, structured on domain knowledge and designed around real-world constraints, visual interfaces can operate as effective sociotechnical governance artifacts enabling responsible decision-making. Grounded in innovation-oriented Human-Centered Computing methodologies, we synthesize insights from a series of design studies conducted via a longitudinal visualization research program, a case study centered on governance dashboard design in a translational setting, and a survey of a cohort of early-stage HealthTech startups. Based on these findings, we articulate design process implications for governance-oriented visualization systems: co-creation with stakeholders, alignment with organizational maturity and context, and support for heterogeneous roles and tasks among others. This work contributes actionable guidance for designing Responsible AI governance dashboards that support decision-making and accountability in early-stage health innovation, and suggests that ecosystem-level coordination can enable more scalable and diverse AI innovation in healthcare.