Medical ethics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Digital transformation offers unprecedented opportunities for advancing healthcare, but also raises complex ethical and legal challenges. Emerging drivers of health disparity termed ‘digital determinants of health’ call for purposeful, equity-focused strategies to ensure that technological innovation benefits all without exacerbating disparities.

Racial and ethnic minoritized populations are underrepresented in clinical trials in nephrology, but overrepresented in adverse kidney disease outcomes. Targeted enrolment, revision of problematic policies, inclusion of minoritized populations in trial planning, and language-, race- and ethnicity-concordant investigative teams can improve representation in clinical trials.

A recent report from the ATLAS trial comparing different maintenance strategies following haematopoeitic stem cell transplantation for multiple myeloma provides an opportunity to explore various themes of critical appraisal, including end points, the equipoise of trial design, and the part censoring can play in the validity of results.

Utilizing an everyday citizenship approach in forensic psychiatric care, by recognizing the agentive actions and relational interactions in mundane activities and caregiving communications, could substantially enhance and advance care practices.

Data-driven approaches hold considerable promise for medical breakthroughs in the precision and cost-effectiveness of the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The scientists and health care professionals who will be responsible for providing the evidence to support these approaches must also consider the ethical challenges involved in the care of people with intellectual impairments.