Medical profiling and online medicine: The ethics of 'personalised' health care in a consumer age
Introduction
Recent technological developments, political and economic priorities and the drive towards patient-centred care have accelerated the pace of personalisation of healthcare services. Such technologies include whole body CT or MRI scans, ‘personal genomics’ where the genome of individual patients is sequenced, online health care and ‘telemedicine’ – the delivery of healthcare services over a distance.
The increasing use of these technologies in this context raises a number of ethical issues, and in October 2008 the Council set up a Working Party to examine the issues further. The Working Party is chaired by Christopher Hood, Professor of Government at the University of Oxford and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Public Services Research Programme.
The Council held a consultation from April - July 2009 to gather views from a wide range of people including those using or contemplating using these services, those involved in providing them in the public and private context, researchers, academics, regulators, policy makers and others.
Responses to the consultation will be carefully considered, and a report with recommendations for policy and practice will be published in summer 2010.
Last Updated Mon, 5 October 2009