Collection

The Ethics of Digital Healthcare

Submission status
Closed

The digitalization of healthcare already has a long history. Today, digitized medical images and patient records are integrated parts of routine healthcare all over the world. What is new, however, is the pace at which new uses of digital information technology are entering healthcare. Video meetings are used both to complement and replace traditional visits to the doctor’s office. Patients undergoing training such as gait rehabilitation are assisted by a robot that partly replaces the physiotherapist. Routine microscopic evaluations of tissues are performed by robots using machine learning techniques, and the question has been asked whether robots will come to replace pathologists in the not too distant future. Robot surgery is increasingly used to improve precision and minimize invasiveness. Artificial Intelligence is developed to support, or possibly replace, the physician’s diagnosis and proposal for treatment. Experiments are being made with talking robots for psychiatric treatment or as social companions. The list of examples is long and we have good reasons to ask: Where will all this take us, and what will the ethical implications be? Can patient safety be upheld when the role of non-human intelligence increases more and more? How will these changes affect the many subtle issues discussed in healthcare ethics, such as informed consent, protection of privacy and autonomy? How might they impact the patient’s relations to physicians and nurses? For this special issue of Digital Society we invite contributions investigating various parts of the broad field of ethical concerns that arise through the digitalization of healthcare. Articles should be submitted to the manuscript handling system of Digital Society, https://www.springer.com/journal/44206. The journal has no page limits, but we expect most contributions to be between 4500 and 9000 words. For more information, write to the special issue editors Barbro Fröding (barbro.froding@abe.kth.se) and Sven Ove Hansson (soh@kth.se).

Editors

  • Sven Ove Hansson Sven Ove Hansson  &

    Sven Ove Hansson

    Sven Ove Hansson is professor emeritus in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and past president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. His research includes contributions to healthcare ethics, moral and political philosophy, the history of political philosophy, the philosophy of risk, the philosophy of science and technology, decision theory, and logic. He has published seventeen books and about 390 papers in refereed international journals and books.

  • Barbro Fröding Barbro Fröding

    Barbro Fröding

    Barbro Fröding, Docent and Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). My main research interests include ethics, bioethics, virtue ethics, ethical aspects of medical technology and the ethics of cognitive enhancement.

Articles (7 in this collection)