Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

Isolation, lack of mentorship, sponsorship, and role models

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Despite the increasing prevalence of women in medicine, they still represent a small percentage of medical school faculty. Due to a “leaky” pipeline, women often do not advance past midlevel academic positions, and few have senior leadership roles. Women may engage in meaningful academic or clinical work that does not traditionally lead to promotion. Even when publication rates are similar within a given field, women still have a slower career trajectory as compared to men. The paucity of women in medicine, especially in leadership roles, can lead to professional isolation, which contributes to burnout and its long-term consequences. Academic institutions can implement a number of strategies to help combat professional isolation among women including promoting mentorship, sponsoring, and coaching activities, creating focused pathways for promotion, providing constructive feedback, and developing a transparent organizational structure