Ethics and New Health Technologies: An Innovative Descriptive Analysis of the State of the Literature

Abstract

The exponential advancement of health technologies has led to an increasing need for awareness and critical thinking about the potential unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas that may arise from using new technologies. Unfortunately, many ethical issues arise post-implementation. Few researchers preemptively consider the ethical implications of health technologies. The current study located more than 24 million articles in PubMed that discussed common health technologies. Of these, 0.07% (n = 17,816) articles deeply considered the technology's potential ethical implications. Critical thinking and ethics are the mainstays of nursing practice. Thus, critically thinking about the potential ethical implications of relevant technologies should be at the forefront of research; we contend that this is not common practice. We hope to shed light on this issue to remind researchers to think like nurses when researching new health technologies.

Keywords

ethics ethical theory ethical implications health technology medical technology unintended effects

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