Heres your ethical quandary for today: Sometimes, even when people have good intentions and clear permission, data analysis can throw up odd ethical quandaries. Recently, for example, the government has asked family GPs to produce a list of people they think are likely to die in the next year. In itself, this is a good idea: a flag appears on the system reminding the doctor to have a conversation, at the next consultation, about planning “end of life care”. In my day job, I spend a lot of time working on interesting uses of health data. My boss suggested that we could look at automatically analysing medical records in order to instantly identify people who are soon to die. This is also a good idea. But add in one final ingredient and the conclusion isn’t so clear. We are entering an age – which we should welcome with open arms – when patients will finally have access to their own full medical records online. So suddenly we have a new problem. One day, you log in to your medical records, and there’s a new entry on your file: “Likely to die in the next year.” We spend a lot of time teaching medical students to be skilful around breaking bad news. A box ticked on your medical records is not empathic communication. Would we hide the box? Is that ethical? Or are “derived variables” such as these, on a medical record, something doctors should share like anything else? Here, again, different people have different intuitions.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 11:47:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015