Medical Information Systems Ethics

4Ethics-Oriented Personalized Medicine

In light of the complexity of many medical situations, the uncertainties into which they lead us and the possibility and, indeed, the requirement of ever-better performances, it is becoming increasingly important to support health professionals in practicing their faculty of discernment. Doctors are also becoming aware of those scenarios that they do not know but can only guess. With their growing knowledge, they are forced to constantly ask themselves: What are the consequences of this new knowledge, and how should we act on it? Do doctors have the moral obligation to satisfy all demands that they are technically able to satisfy?

Experience shows us that in order to resolve these situations, which are difficult for both the patients and those around them, doctors need frameworks to help structure the analysis of the situation and to better understand the issues. The quest for discernment is one of the crucial aims of a dialogue-based approach: a demanding approach whose application is more complicated than simply writing a prescription. Perhaps one of the fundamental goals of ethics is that everyone, every day, should be able to create his/her own way of becoming more human [MAL 00].

In this ethical approach, doctors themselves play a privileged role, witnessing and indeed aiding the progress of science simply by doing their jobs every day. It is up to them to determine their own human values as a frame of reference and to define their ...