For many years, the field of medicine has relied on technology to give clear answers to medical mysteries and help assist in saving lives. This technology has been highly praised and sought after by top hospitals to deliver the best possible care. However, as technology comes to a new age many questions have come up regarding the ethics of these newly developed innovations. These questions challenge the ethical standards of medicine which raised concern among the public. Many are now starting to question whether the addition of greater technology would be helpful or harmful.
Ethical Guidelines
The concerns brought up by the public regard patient safety and privacy. Many feel as if the human component is needed when making a medical decision that best fits the patient's needs and end goal. Medical researchers have brought up specific patient requests that interfere with treatment which raises the question, would a robot be able to perform as morally correct as a human? Another concern is safety, the fresh technology needs to be tested on human subjects to ensure its reliability. But with the concerns about how it will perform there is a greater risk that the robot will make a mistake than perform up to par. Knowing this makes patients weary of allowing a robot to perform an entirely experimental procedure. Many of the kinks are still being worked out but so many can only be caught when not on a human subject. Human testing is required to move forward with the creation, however, if few subjects volunteer it is unlikely the innovation will further. HIPAA ethics are also being threatened at the hands of this new technology. When the robot treats a patient it gathers their history and their current medical condition and stores it in its hardware system. This poses a risk of private medical information being leaked due to a technological error that violates HIPAA ethics. With many ethical guidelines being at risk of being broken, the technology has all around been avoided by doctors and patients.
Government Involvement
With all the ethical concerns brought up, the help of government involvement to break the debate was required. The government inspected different aspects of the medical ethics being broken and how the technology could be managed to avoid any consequences. Human care was compared to robotic care while measured on an ethical level to determine the participation of technology. Technology lacks the moral aspect of human care. If someone were to have a preference for their procedure it could likely be accommodated with human care, however, with robotic care it follows a set of rules encoded into its system of how to treat a patient, disregarding any personal preferences voiced by the patient. Knowing this makes human care more attractive to a certain extent. Technological care has proven to be more accurate and precise in its execution of care which is what made it popular in the first place. Dependency has also been an issue brought up by the government and healthcare workers. Robotic technology is an AI system with encoded information that allows it to perform the correct tasks asked to do. But, if something were to go wrong in a procedure it is unsure whether technology would have the correct answer to solve the issue. There are common complications in every procedure but with the idea in mind that anything could go wrong it poses another concern with technology on its reliability and dependability. At the moment, further involvement of technology in the medical field has been halted due to too many ethical concerns that endanger patient safety.
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