Medical Ethics Challenges and Countermeasures under Different Internet Hospitals Operation Modes / 中国医学伦理学

ABSTRACT

Internet hospitals played a huge role in meeting patients’ medical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a new service model, it also brings new challenges to medical ethics. This paper analyzed the three key elements of behavior: actors, behavior process and action result, and found that apart from ethical challenges such as medical security, data security and privacy protection, different types of Internet hospitals show diversity due to different actors involved. The first type of Internet hospital represented the conflict of interest of doctors brought by the integration of offline and online working modes. The second type showed the challenge of fairness in medical treatment brought by the demand of personalized service provided by medical staff in public medical institutions. The third type manifested the medical security challenges brought by doctors with varying technical levels in an open platform environment. Combined with the current ethical governance of science and technology and the digital transformation of society, this paper put forward some countermeasures and suggestion, such as further clarifying the boundaries of rights and responsibilities of relevant subjects of Internet platform, formulating the code of conduct requirements for medical staff in Internet hospitals, and supervising doctors’ medical practice in Internet hospitals.