Ethical assessment in e-Health

Abstract

While innovative e-Health and m-Health technologies and solutions will eventually change the way health and social care are delivered, it raises many challenges regarding what sort of ethical concerns need to be addressed in order to provide imperative regulations and guidance to healthcare professionals and developers. This paper discusses key ethical challenges identified as part of an ongoing research project funded under the European Commission's Future Internet-Private Public Partnership (FI-PPP) initiative. The Future Internet Social Technological Alignment Research project (FI-STAR) is concerned with the validation of Future Internet technology developed under earlier FI-PPP projects and involves seven early trials in the healthcare domain. The project is supported by 26 European partners with a further extension of 10 partners or so pending. The challenges discussed in this paper include ethical-legal frameworks, privacy and international harmonization. The suggestions discussed in this paper include an overarching e-Health ethical framework, an ethical impact assessment and an ethical matrix. The ethical matrix can be used as a tool to illuminate the diverse requirements among the seven uses cases and to narrow down potential strategies to address the ethical challenges.