In this week’s blog post, I want to focus on ethics in designing digital health tools. This decade will see significant shifts in data use, privacy, and transparency as more voices will demand it. Consumers, whose data has been bought and sold without their knowledge, will weigh the convenience of having digital services over their privacy. As more health systems avail of a digital health layer to their care models, they do will move the needle of standards for privacy and data use.
The Research Center for Optimal Digital Ethics- also known as ReCODE Health, is a consortium that offers researchers, ethicists, designers, and institutions guidance in designing digital health tools.
The URL listed below has a growing resource library that provides essential state of the art guidance on how to ethically design tools to support digital health. Globally, researchers have also listed with profiles if their core expertise, which can help companies to connect to experts in different aspects of ethical design. I highly recommend availing of this expertise if you are developing digital health tools as guidance on standards for terms and conditions, sample consent forms for data use, framing for tracking data if using sensors is all part of ReCODE Health’s remit for researchers and developers. Over the coming months, they will be releasing detailed guidance on dimensions to consider when designing for different patient populations.
Work like ReCODE’s is vital to evolve where digital health needs to move and how we can best serve consumers in support of their health. We have experienced two decades of the internet. We will see significant advances in data use and privacy, which allow consumers to be part of the consent process in a transparent manner.
Thanks for reading – Trina
(Opinions are my own)
References
Resource Library
https://thecore-platform.ucsd.edu/resources
