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Digital Medicine: An Opportunity to Revisit the Role of Bioethicists

In their article “The Ethics of Smart Pills and Self-Acting Devices: Autonomy, Truth-Telling, and Trust at the Dawn of Digital Medicine,” Klugman et al. (2018) argue that digital medicine is changing medical practice. As the authors remark, these changes have repercussions for medical ethics as they raise questions with regard to well-known themes such as informed consent, therapeutic misconception, and confidentiality of data. Ethical scrutiny for digital health practices is indeed needed to assure that data are collected, used, and stored in appropriate manners. An aspect that remains implicit in Klugman and colleagues’ article is that, in the rapidly changing context of emerging health care technologies, the role and focus of the ethicist need to be revisited. Broadening ethicists’ focus is key within the evolving and interdisciplinary domain of digital health and requires us to adapt roles and approaches in order to be able to innovate and provide meaningful orientation in digital medicine. In the following, we outline what we believe these roles and approaches could be and how they apply to the practice of digital medicine.