Kenneth Goodman

• University of Miami

Purpose: The American College of Epidemiology (ACE) held its 2021 Annual Meeting virtually, September 8-10, with a conference theme of "From Womb to Tomb: Insights from Health Emergencies". The ACE Ethics Committee hosted a symposium session in recognition of the ethical and social challenges brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic and on the oc...

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence in health and medicine has been paralleled by an extraordinary effort to identify and address the ethical issues raised by this technology. It has become clear that the success of AI in patient care and research is dependent on the success of this effort to address appropriate software quality and standards,...

Ethics code for informaticians

A discussion and debate on the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) Working Group listserv in 2021 raised important issues related to a forthcoming conference in Texas. Texas had recently enacted a restrictive abortion law and restricted voting rights. Several AMIA members advocated for a boycot...

In the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns exist that ventilator triage policies may lead to discrimination against people with disabilities. This study evaluates whether preclinical medical students demonstrate bias towards people with disabilities during an educational ventilator-allocation exercise. Written student responses to a triage simulation activ...

Introduction COVID-19 has confronted clinicians with a potential need to ration ventilators. There is little guidance for training medical students to make such decisions in future practice. How students would make ventilator triage decisions remains unknown. Methods One hundred fifty-three medical students in 18 problem-based learning groups parti...

This chapter introduces and reviews scholarship on ethical issues in health information technology. It identifies the ethical foundations of health informatics and then addresses a suite of key challenges, issues and controversies. These include the question of appropriate use and users, including “The Standard View”; standards for education and sy...

This commentary reviews ethics in epidemiology and public health (PH) syllabi collected in 2011 and 2018. The syllabi repository was an American College of Epidemiology (ACE) Ethics Committee project to support institutions and faculty introducing, furthering or improving ethics in epidemiology and public health courses. Of 83 syllabi from 52 accre...

The development and implementation of clinical decision support (CDS) that trains itself and adapts its algorithms based on new data—here referred to as Adaptive CDS—present unique challenges and considerations. Although Adaptive CDS represents an expected progression from earlier work, the activities needed to appropriately manage and support the...

The COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States has exposed significant gaps in information systems and processes to enable timely clinical and public health decision-making. Specifically, the use of informatics to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, support COVID-19 care delivery, and accelerate knowledge discovery bring to the forefront issues...

The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) will not accredit an organization that it defines as a commercial interest, that is an entity that produces, markets, re-sells, or distributes health care goods or services consumed by, or used on, patients. Thus, commercial interests are not eligible to be accredited organizations...

Effective implementation of artificial intelligence in behavioral healthcare delivery depends on overcoming challenges that are pronounced in this domain. Self and social stigma contribute to under-reported symptoms, and under-coding worsens ascertainment. Health disparities contribute to algorithmic bias. Lack of reliable biological and clinical m...

[One of the 3 best articles by IMIA-2020 Yearbook (https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/pdf/10.1055/s-0040-1702027.pdf)] Documentation of code status and advance directives for end-of-life (EOL) care improves care and quality of life, decreases cost of care, and increases the likelihood of an experience desired by the patient and his/h...

The landscape in research ethics has changed significantly in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past two decades. Research ethics has gone from being a largely foreign concept and unfamiliar practice to an integral and growing feature of regional health research systems. Four bioethics training programs have been funded by the Fogarty Intern...

In 2011, the US Supreme Court decided Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc., a case that addressed the mining of large aggregated databases and the sale of prescriber data for marketing prescription drugs. The court struck down a Vermont law that required data mining companies to obtain permission from individual providers before selling prescription records...

AMIA, as other professional societies, has a long-standing interest in promoting a strong ethical framework for its membership. This white paper presents the latest AMIA Code of Professional and Ethical Conduct. It was approved in November of 2011 by the AMIA Board of Directors. This document constitutes a revision of, and update to, the first code...

The current commercial health information technology (HIT) arena encompasses a number of competing firms that provide electronic health applications to hospitals, clinical practices, and other healthcare-related entities. Such applications collect, store, and analyze patient information. Some vendors incorporate contract language whereby purchasers...

One of the largest, oldest, and most interesting challenges in health care is the balancing act in which clinicians have generally uncontroversial duties both to individual patients and to communities. Physicians and nurses must — so we teach them — put patients first, and at the same time recognize that individuals are members of communities. Indi...

N. Sharkey exaggerated the dangers of robotics use in his Perspective on “The ethical frontiers of robotics” (19 December 2008, p. [1800][1]). Although the number of child-minding robots has increased in some countries, such technology should perhaps be regarded as a special case of ubiquitous

The ancient values of privacy and confidentiality have been a vital part of professional medical practice for millennia. Practical and theoretical reasons undergird this insight. The values are so important that society has come to require that health professionals and others safeguard medical information. Diverse state-based laws and statutes were...

It has become a commonplace observation that scientific progress often, if not usually, outstrips or precedes the ethical analyses and tools that society increasingly relies on and even demands. In the case of data mining and knowledge discovery in databases, such an observation would be mistaken. There are, in fact, a number of useful ethical prec...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems identify and track objects, animals and, in principle, people. The ability to gather information obtained by tracking consumer goods, government documents, monetary transactions and human beings raises a number of interesting and important privacy issues. Moreover, RFID systems pose an ensemble of other...

Discrete maladies or illnesses tend to produce particular signs and symptoms. This natural correlation makes possible the process of diagnosis and prognosis. In fact, so strong is our belief in the regularity of signs and symptoms that the process has long been regarded as straightforward, if not easy: “. . . there is nothing remarkable,” Hippocrat...

The law on the protection of human subjects in biomedical and behavioral research remains unclear for research subjects of reduced capacity. Regulations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services fail to address many of the key issues. Federal regulations prohibit participation in research unless the investigator has obtained a legally eff...

After reading this chapter, you should know the answers to these questions: Why is ethics important to informatics? What are the leading ethical issues that arise in health care informatics? What are examples of appropriate and inappropriate uses and users for health-related software? Why does the establishment of standards touch on ethical issues?...

The growth of evidence-based medicine (EBM) raises a number of ethical issues that have too often been overlooked. These include issues that arise when clinicians make judgments under uncertainty, new challenges for the clinician-patient relationship, new duties for institutional review boards, issues in physician autonomy and reimbursement, and ch...

New technology always raises compelling ethical questions. As those in medicine increasingly depend on computers and other intelligent machines, the intersection of ethics, computing and the health professions grows much more complex and significant. This book attempts systematically to identify and address the full range of ethical issues that ari...

New technology always raises compelling ethical questions. As those in medicine increasingly depend on computers and other intelligent machines, the intersection of ethics, computing and the health professions grows much more complex and significant. This book attempts systematically to identify and address the full range of ethical issues that ari...