Privacy, security, informed consent, and conflict of interest are ethical issues in healthcare that also are relevant in the health informatics field. A revised code of ethics from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) addresses these and other concerns.1
“Emerging ethical issues in informatics include the impact of new technologies on patients and healthcare providers; bias and discrimination in artificial intelligence and machine learning; health equity and how health IT supports or impedes it; the patient safety implications of electronic health records, medical and consumer devices, and software systems; and the digital divide,” according to lead author Carolyn Petersen, MS, MBI, FAMIA, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.
The updated guidance includes an emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, along with a recommendation to providers about notifying patients about the type and amount of health information that will be collected. Also, patient and care team members should be made aware when artificial intelligence-related (AI) systems are in use.
“This includes mobile apps and other functionality that works similarly to AI/ML [machine learning] algorithms but that don’t quite meet the technical definitions of AI or ML,” Petersen notes.
REFERENCE
1. Petersen C, Berner ES, Cardillo A, et al. AMIA’s code of professional and ethical conduct 2022. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2022; Oct 13:ocac192. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocac192.
Privacy, security, informed consent, and conflict of interest are ethical issues in healthcare that also are relevant in the health informatics field. A revised code of ethics from the American Medical Informatics Association addresses these and other concerns.
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