Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

Ethical, legal, and social issues related to health information technology are emerging as central issues. All are within the purview of AMIA’s Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Working Group, where a range of issues are discussed related to health information technology and systems:

• Protecting private information
• HIT system vendor-provider relationships
• Patient safety
• Ethics of good design and data displays
• User involvement
• System implementation
• Liability
• Risk assessments
• Training adequacy
• Biobanking
• Computer decision support
• Curriculum development
• Ethical dilemmas created by the use of health information technologies
• Secondary data use
• Public health
• Security
• Surveillance
• Research ethics
• Autonomy and empowerment (especially in light of new health and telehealth technologies)
• Social networking
• Policy and Regulation

We actively collaborate with other AMIA working groups, and our varied backgrounds from healthcare to law to philosophy to social science make for lively and provocative discussions on our active listserve, wiki, and monthly conference calls.