Healthcare Digitalized

Abstract

Ever since medicine became a recognized profession, the relationship between patients and physicians was marked by authoritarian paternalism. With the advent of bioethics in the 1970s, patients' right to participate in decision making led to proclaim autonomy as the primary principle in clinical medicine and biomedical research, practically exercised as informed consent; yet, the issue remains contended and poorly regulated. Healthcare digitalization disassembles persons into clouds of data. Individual decision making is interfered with and replaced by dominant algorithms, supposedly delivering a P4 composite of precision medicine: personalized, preventive, predictive, participatory. Biomedicine develops into medicalization, marketization contractual client/provider relationship, and neglect of personal care for the ill and frail. These trends become dominant in digitalized healthcare as personal healthcare relationships, and ethically unsatisfactory medical services replace the psychosocial, existential elements of health/disease.