Registration Link: Click Here
MH Conversations and Connections Series – Lunchtime Seminar
Title: Healthcare Ethics and Digital Health Futures: Promises, Pitfalls, and Practice
Date: 27 March 2026 (Friday)
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 pm HKT
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Registration Link: Click Here
Abstract:
Digital health technologies are increasingly reshaping how healthcare is delivered, understood, and experienced by patients, practitioners, and researchers. However, the benefits are neither automatic nor equitably distributed, and the ethical implications require careful and sustained scrutiny. This talk examines both the promises and the pitfalls of digital health through three case studies, each chosen to illuminate distinct challenges emerging at the intersection of digital technologies and healthcare practice.
The first case study explores the use of AI for mental health support, highlighting issues of safety, efficacy, and the risk of replacing relational care with computational proxies. The second considers AI‑enabled diagnostic tools, focusing on questions of bias, interpretability, and shifting professional responsibility. The third examines governance and access within secure data environments, drawing attention to tensions between privacy, research value, and public trust.
Building on these cases, I propose an approach to practice that acknowledges digital transformation as inevitable, yet frames digital health as a dynamic moral landscape as opposed to being on a set trajectory. It argues that ethical, trustworthy digital futures require participation and responsibility from all involved, and positions ethics as a central, ongoing practice in dialogue with developers, clinicians, institutions, and patients.
Speaker:
Prof Jonathan Ives
Professor of Empirical Bioethics and Head of Population Health Sciences,
Deputy Head of Bristol Medical School
Moderator:
Prof Gilberto Leung
Director, School of Clinical Medicine, HKUMed
Co-Director, Centre for Medical Ethics and Law
Clinical Professor
Tsang Wing-Hing Professor in Clinical Neuroscience
Discussant:
Prof Emmanuel Cheung
Clinical Assistant Professor of Practice
Critical Care Medicine Unit/ Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit,
School of Clinical Medicine, HKUMed
Speaker’s Bio:
Prof Jonathan Ives
Professor Ives is Professor of Empirical Bioethics, Head of Population Health Sciences, and Deputy Head of Bristol Medical School. He initially trained in philosophy, and now works as an interdisciplinary bioethicist at the nexus of ethics and social science in healthcare, with a particular focus on, and expertise in, empirical bioethics methodology, on which he has published widely and delivers training worldwide.
His research interests are varied and include: surgical innovation; ethics and trust of AI/autonomous systems; best interests decision making; clinical and research ethics; ethics, reproduction and parenthood, mental health, and EDI. His work has been funded by, for example, the Wellcome Trust, NIHR, EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC.
Professor Ives has published on a wide range of topics including ethics and fatherhood, research ethics, technology and innovation, end of life ethics, and clinical ethics, and he is lead editor of ‘Empirical Bioethics: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives’ (Cambridge University Press) and of the newly commissioned Routledge Handbook of Empirical Bioethics.
Professor Ives is Chair of the BNSSG Risk and Ethics Advisory Forum, Deputy Chair of the South West Secure Data Environment Data Access Committee, and a member of the NICE Highly Specialised Technologies Evaluation Committee. He sits on the Wellcome Trust Discovery Award Career Development panel, and is a member of Belgium’s FWO Med8 funding panel. He has previously sat on the RCGP Medical Ethics Committee, and chaired the IME Grants and Awards Committee as a Trustee.
Welcome to join us!
Enquiry: Please contact Mr Edison Cheng (mehu@hku.hk).