Call for Papers
The Ethics of Digital Healthcare
Special issue of Digital Society
Submission deadline: January 2, 2023
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. The deadline for submissions is January 2, 2023.
For more information, write to the special issue editors Barbro Fröding (barbro.froding@abe.kth.se) and Sven Ove Hansson (soh@kth.se).
[From:
Dr Barbro Fröding
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and History
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Stockholm, Sweden]
|
