Bioethics Monthly Seminar Series: On Digital Medicine and a Duty to the Destitute

In the early days of modern medicine, helping the poor was emphasised as a professional duty for physicians. The American Medical Association, for example, stated: “to individuals in indigent circumstances, such professional services should always be cheerfully and freely accorded”. We term this the duty to the destitute: the moral obligation clinicians have toward patients who cannot afford care. However, in practice, this duty is often unmet, attributable to organisational and resource constraints that morally excuse clinicians from fulfilling it. But now, evidence-based, regulated, and cost-minimising digital medicine products are entering the clinic and may help providers meet their duty to the destitute. We argue that digital medicine will make it increasingly impermissible to withhold or deny care to indigent patients, and that digital medicine developers, by virtue of the clinical functions their products perform, are morally required to meet this duty to the destitute as well. Speakers: Jesse Gray is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium, and he is affiliated with the Bioethics Institute Ghent and the METAMEDICA consortium. Outside his primary research in applied ethics, his broader academic interests include metaethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of mind. Tania Moerenhout is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Bioethics at the University of Otago and a general practitioner in Dunedin. Her main research interests lie in digital health ethics, with a particular focus on integrating ethical principles into health technology design, assistive technology for older adults, artificial intelligence, and secondary data use.