Q-Pain: A Question Answering Dataset to Measure Social Bias in Pain Management

We introduce Q-Pain, a dataset for assessing bias in medical QA in the context
of pain management. We developed 55 medical question-answer pairs across five
different types of pain management: each question includes a detailed patient-
specific medical scenario ("vignette") designed to enable the substitution of
multiple different racial and gender "profiles" and to evaluate whether bias
is present when answering whether or not to prescribe medication.

Along with the dataset, we propose a new framework, including a sample
experimental design, to measure the potential bias present during medical
decision-making for patients with particular demographic profiles. We
demonstrate its use in assessing two reference QA systems, GPT-2 and GPT-3,
selected for their documented ability to answer questions given only a few
examples. We hope that our dataset and framework will be used to assess bias
across a wide variety of pain management QA systems.