Ethical and Medico-Philosophical Challenges for Digital Medicine's Benefit to Individual Patients

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Marco Stier
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 467991668

Future’s medical research and treatment will change epochally due to the advent of digital technologies. Big-data based treatment advances, increasing digital communication, and the possibility of time- and space-independent patient surveillance will surely be of massive benefit. Yet, there are also risks of harm. In the centre of all normative reflection about how to best shape and control digitalised medicine must be the patient as its primary beneficiary. On the one hand, individual patient benefit comprises a higher degree of the realisation of medicine’s traditional goals. On the other hand, it also includes various aspects of the patient’s role, his intra- and interpersonal relations, and his resulting social embedding. These aspects will be of paramount importance for the overall benefit of tomorrow’s medicine. The project analyses this topic by reference to five core-principles. These are (1) patient’s decisional authority, (2) privacy and individuality, (3) patients’ self-relation and understanding of disease, (4) patient-doctor-machine relationship, and (5) patient trust.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Bettina Schöne-Seifert