Closed-loop medical devices such as brain-computer interfaces are an emerging and rapidly advancing neurotechnology. The target patients for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are often severely paralyzed, and thus particularly vulnerable in terms of personal autonomy, decisionmaking capacity, and agency. Here we analyze the effects of closed-loop medical devices on the autonomy and accountabilit...

Financial conflicts of interest exist between industry and physicians, and these relationships have the power to influence physicians’ medical practice. Transparency about conflicts matters for ensuring adequate informed consent, controlling healthcare expenditure, and encouraging physicians’ reflection on professionalism. The US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Open ...

Purpose This study aims to investigate the ethical issues related internet of Things (IoT) deployment in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from an individual employee's perspective. To provide researchers practitioners with concrete tools for examining these matters, framework dedicated IoT is introduced. Design/methodology/approach First, applicability Mason's original privacy, accura...

This paper investigates the use of high-level action languages for designing ethical autonomous agents. It proposes a novel and modular logic-based framework for representing and reasoning over a variety of ethical theories, based on a modified version of the Event Calculus and implemented in Answer Set Programming. The ethical decision-making process is conceived of as a multi-step procedure c...

BACKGROUND Priority setting is one of the most difficult issues facing hospitals because of funding restrictions and changing patient need. A deadly communicable disease outbreak, such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto in 2003, amplifies the difficulties of hospital priority setting. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate priority setting in a hospital in...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to describe the process used to decide which patients are admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital with special focus on access for neurosurgery patients, and evaluate it using "accountability for reasonableness". METHODS Qualitative case study methodology was used. Data were collected from documents, interviews with key informants, and ...

Ethical challenges in public health can have a significant impact on the health of communities if they impede efficiencies and best practices. Competing needs for resources and a plurality of values can challenge public health policymakers and practitioners to make fair and effective decisions for their communities. In this paper, the authors offer an analytic framework designed to assist polic...

Medicine has traditionally focused on specialty and subspecialty expertise, which subsequently leads to fragmentation, inefficiencies, and lack of accountability. From this focus came a new idea: The Institute. The Institute has transformed our culture, fundamentally affecting the way we approach patient care and how we foster accountability rather than blame. It focuses on system failures rath...