Educational Opportunities in Ethics and Values at SBM

Education, Training, and Career Development (ETCD) Council Corner

Sherri Sheinfeld Gorin, PhD, FSBM, Chair, SBM Ethics Working Group; ETCD Council member

“Scientists are in a unique position to lead the development of a responsive ethical infrastructure and to inform stakeholders about how to innovate in a way that is pro-ethics, pro-tech and pro-humanity.”
(Sherry Pagoto & Camille Nebeker, 2019).  

Welcome to the “Education, Training, and Career Development (ETCD) Council corner!” In each issue of Outlook, the ETCD provides SBM members with opportunities and support to enhance their training and career development in behavioral medicine. In this issue, we explore the training opportunities for the members of SBM — particularly those who work at the intersection of digital health and behavioral health — who may encounter special challenges to privacy, confidentiality, and equity. Given these challenges, how can SBM help us to continue to serve the best interests of our patients, research participants, organizations, and society at large?

In June, 2017, the leadership of SBM approved the formation of an Ethics Working Group (EWG) to help advance SBM's ethical and responsible practices, particularly related to digital health. The increasing involvement of industry at the intersection of health technology and digital research-- combined with new opportunities for SBM collaboration-- introduces new and unique challenges to our organization as well as its members.

Each of us faces complex ethical dilemmas with the massive growth of digital health technologies, including social media and wearable sensors. Further, with novel advances in artificial intelligence and digital phenotyping, combined with an insufficient regulatory infrastructure, SBM members and those whom they encounter in research and clinical settings face new potential risks to privacy and data confidentiality. High profile cases, such as the Cambridge Analytica data breach and Facebook’s emotional contagion study have negative impacts on our scientific community, affecting society's view of all of us.

We must take responsibility--in our role as researchers--to be in front of the digital health technology issues and practice anticipatory intelligence to the extent possible. Through ethical standards, we may promote a variety of other important moral and social values, such as serving the public good, evidence-based decision-making, consonance of interests, distributive justice, autonomy, integrity, transparency, and accountability.

One of the major activities of the EWG has been educating our members, to guide them as they face these daunting ethical challenges.  In our presidential symposium at SBM2019, we – Drs. Sheinfeld Gorin (chair), Solomonides, Vitak, Hughes Halbert, Torous, and Paltoo (discussant) – highlighted the implications of ubiquitous and pervasive digital technologies for clinicians, researchers, IRB's, consumers, and patients. We presented an evaluation approach for behavioral health apps that enriches the process of informed consent.

At our SBM2019 mid-day meeting, co-sponsored with ETCD, we discussed the accomplishments of our EWG to-date and our future plans. Together, we examined the failed medical device company Theranos, within an ethics risk/benefit framework. We emphasized the importance of peer-reviewed science for developing technologies. Similarly, at our citizen science panel, co-led with AMIA, we discussed the ethical questions at the core of this enlarging approach.

 Please join us at our forthcoming EWG webinar:

Digital Health Decision-Making Checklist: Designed for Researchers
Date: April 18, 2019
Time: 1:00 p.m. ET
Register at: https://sbm.execinc.com/edibo/BCWebinars