Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 2, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: May 2, 2022 - Jun 27, 2022
Date Accepted: Aug 19, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Revised Hippocratic Oath for The Era of Digital Health
ABSTRACT
Background:
Physicians have been taking the Hippocratic Oath for centuries. The Oath contains a set of ethical rules designed to guide physicians through their profession; it articulates a set of true north principles that govern the practice of medicine.
Objective:
The rise of digital health has dramatically changed the practice of medicine in a way that could not have been easily predicted at the time Hippocrates outlined his ethical principles of medicine.
Methods:
We reviewed the points of the Oath and suggested revised sections.
Results:
We believe that it now justified to modify the Hippocratic Oath—even if modestly—to reflect the digital health revolution, advances in patient empowerment, and the evolving role of technology in the everyday practice of medicine.
Conclusions:
This way, younger physicians below the digital divide can better relate to the Oath, while older physicians above the digital divide can gain further insights and inspiration from the pledge.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.