The arrival of the big data era has led to the development of individualized medicine, while the application of genetic technology has brought precision medicine to the fore. The combination of individualized medicine and precision medicine foreshadows the direction of medical change in the era of big data: triggering a revolution in healthcare through the digitized human body.
In the era of big data, a potential change is emerging, and taking control of one's medical process and healthcare becomes the core of the change. The operation of big data platforms in healthcare will advance a revolutionary reconfiguration of the moral form of medicine as it scales up and becomes more efficient in relation to overall human health, social ****goodness,**** the ethics of enjoyment, and improvements in personal healthcare.
First, the improvement of overall human health through individualized medicine. The importance of the digital human body and genomics is that it brings about a shift or change in the center of gravity of medicine through the convergent use of big data technology and genetic screening technology. It provides people with two main medical exhortations: first, prevention is more important than treatment; second, medicine can only follow individualized science to bring about substantial improvements in overall human health. In the era of big data, cell phones will be the lifeline that enables people in remote areas to access the healthcare they need and creates a digitally networked system for communities through data feedback. Through big data, patient-centered healthcare can excel in areas such as health training, online diagnostics, prevention and disaster response, regardless of time and space.
Secondly, doctor-patient tensions are defused through the construction of public ****healthy goodness. The focus of the reconfiguration of the moral form of medicine in the digital age is to construct the public **** good through individualized science, and thus to ease the tension between doctors and patients. There is a clear disconnect between bioethics' emphasis on individualized rights and its emphasis on overall population health. However, individual autonomy or self-determination is only an abstract principle of rights if it is not supported by individualized medicine based on the "digital human body + gene sequencing". The health or treatment guidelines provided by medical big data to individuals are similar to nautical charts, both for patients and doctors. It provides a worldview that has never been available before, and it makes the patient truly the center of medicine.
Once again, the ethic of open ****enjoyment is demonstrated through convergent medicine. With the advent of the digital age, governments are recognizing the importance of open data and introducing decrees for open data. Big data in healthcare connects patients as points of medical information into a sea of data. As a result, an open***ed healthcare IT system can predict the distribution or prevalence of certain diseases through correlation mining. Open*** access to data will lead to a series of convergences that will merge the rapidly maturing digital, non-medical domains of mobile devices, cloud computing, and social networking with the burgeoning digital medical domain of genomics, biosensors, and advanced imaging technologies. Medicine or medical technology may embody the concept of "the doctor who treats the sick before they get sick" by emphasizing more on prevention.
Finally, individualized healthcare is provided through open and integrated teams of specialists. The practice of medical technology based on the network platform makes the medical team diagnosis and treatment mode become the basic mode of future medical diagnosis and treatment. The practice of medical technology in the era of big data provides a new form of "team medicine", in which medicine is no longer a single doctor's fight, but a team of experts based on the network space to provide patients with customized individualized medical services. Providing medical and health services to individuals in teams constructs a truly patient-centered form of medical ethics. The mass aggregation of data collected from individuals will ultimately create an ethical sphere of virtuous feedback that will benefit all participants in the health program and encourage more and more people to participate.
The health revolution in the era of big data depends, in technological form, on the establishment of a precision medicine model based on the digitized human body. The combination of wireless sensors, big data and genomics is at its vanguard. This reconfiguration of the moral form of medicine highlights three major ethical and moral dilemmas.
First, personal privacy and security issues. In the era of digitization and informationization, the medical industry is faced with the double trouble of protecting information security and protecting personal privacy. One of the security and privacy risks is the risk posed by employees using their own mobile devices to connect to the IT infrastructure of the healthcare system, which is the weakest link for malware intrusion, and is known as the "bring your own device" problem in the healthcare field. The implementation of mobile or personalized healthcare plans (or wellness programs), which is the plan of many top-tier clinics and hospitals, is bound to face this challenge. This is in addition to the problems inherent in big data or precision medicine models, such as the theft of data from medical devices or monitors. At the same time, does a hospital's use of a data platform to collect and analyze sensitive information about a particular patient violate an individual's privacy? Are the collection, monitoring, and analytical processing of personal health information by government agencies and enterprises in compliance with privacy rules? What collection rules should be followed for medical data, commercial data, scientific research data, etc.? Protection of participant privacy is a prerequisite for both medical research and all health programs. Only by seeking a balance between the protection of individual privacy and the full utilization of databases can we deal with the privacy and security ethical issues of medical bioethics in the era of big data.
Secondly, the issue of truthfulness and reliability of data. How to prevent data from being untrustworthy or distorted is the ethical challenge at the benchmark level encountered by data *** enjoyment. The practice of medical technology built on the basis of the digitized human body itself presupposes an unbreakable ethical bottom line. As the human body and its state of health are recorded, stored and disseminated in a digitized form, a mirror or digital human being is formed as opposed to a physical human being. Failure to trust or distorted data results in precision medicine, which is presupposed to be credible, becoming untrustworthy. This can occur, for example, if there are concerns about personal health data or genetic data adversely affecting an individual's career and future life, when conditions are in place to game the data system by concealing, withholding, or providing false data, which in turn leads to inaccuracies in the electronic medical record and health information system (HIT) and the individual's health record (HER). How to govern or guard against data misrepresentation or distortion is an ethical challenge to data ****enjoyment in the digital age, and it constitutes a major issue in the ethics of biomedicine in the era of big data.
Third, the challenge of digital divide or value divide. The digital divide refers to the huge difference in the use of digital technology or information technology by different social groups, which is divided into four aspects: access, application, knowledge, and value. With the gradual resolution of the access problem, the application and knowledge divides are narrowing, and the value divide is becoming more and more prominent. This suggests that we must pay full attention to the change in values brought about by the digital health revolution. Only by narrowing the value gap and making people realize that the personal health revolution based on individualized medicine and precision medicine is a kind of medical change that integrates the individual with the whole, and that it shows the value core of the health revolution in the digital era, i.e., the moral form of patient-centered medicine, can we get more people to participate in the construction of the big data platform for healthcare.
The basic principle of big data, genomics, mobile healthcare and precision medicine is to connect the totality of the smallest actors and the largest data computation, which is the ethical quality of modern medical technology in the era of big data. Big Data's reorientation of individual and collective interrelationships has had an undeniable impact on both individuals and collectives - it provides a way of inextricably linking the individual and the collective in an increasingly individualized modern society, forcing individuals to rethink the contemporary implications of collective or overarching values. Of course, this reflection must be premised on the preservation of the freedom, dignity and rights of the individual. At the same time, the ethical concept of starting from the group or the whole has regained its rightful place, and constitutes an intrinsic fit with the Chinese ethical culture that emphasizes the concepts of correlative thinking and holistic harmony. This is the most attractive development direction of bioethics in the era of big data.