ArticleBMC medical ethics2025
Ethical and social considerations of applying artificial intelligence in healthcare-a two-pronged scoping review.
Article in BMC medical ethics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Ethical implications of high attrition in AI-based mental health interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC medical ethics · 2026Pooled it
- Diagnostic accuracy of large language models for emergency department triage: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC emergency medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Artificial intelligence in nursing: a systematic review of attitudes, literacy, readiness, and adoption intentions among nursing students and practicing nurses.Frontiers in digital health · 2025Pooled it
- The Perceived Influence of AI on the Craftsmanship of Physicians: Qualitative Interview and Focus Group Study.JMIR AI · 2026Article
- Review
- Systemic fragility in European total intravenous anesthesia delivery and opportunities for resilient real-time decision support.Communications medicine · 2026Review
- A Pathway from Law to Care: How the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Medical Device Regulation, and the Public Procurement Directive Can Contribute to Ensuring Quality in Healthcare.Health care analysis : HCA : journal of health philosophy and policy · 2026Article
- Explainability and Human Oversight for AI-Generated Exercise Guidance in Digital Healthcare: A Governance-Oriented Narrative Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Review
- Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Care of Terminally Ill Patients.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- When Intuition Meets the Algorithm: Medico-Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence-Driven Decision-Making in Orthopedics.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- [Application and progress of artificial intelligence agents in drug development].Zhejiang da xue xue bao. Yi xue ban = Journal of Zhejiang University. Medical sciences · 2026Review
- Key Information Influencing Patient Decision-Making About AI in Health Care: Survey Experiment Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Impact of Hospital Hierarchy on Nurses' Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence: Mediating Roles of Artificial Intelligence Literacy and Anxiety.Journal of nursing management · 2026Article
- The "DeepSeek effect" and the adoption-integration gap of generative artificial intelligence in clinical practice: a national online convenience cross-sectional survey of academic critical care physicians in China.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Advance Bioinformatics in Africa: Opportunities, Challenges, and Ethical Considerations in Combating Antimicrobial Resistance.Bioinformatics and biology insights · 2026Article
- Design biology and mind-body health.Journal, genetic engineering & biotechnology · 2025Review
- Assessing LLM-generated vs. expert-created clinical anatomy MCQs: a student perception-based comparative study in medical education.Medical education online · 2025Article
- Artificial Intelligence in Environment and Human Health: Progress, Opportunities and Challenges.Current environmental health reports · 2025Review
- How Could Artificial Intelligence Change the Doctor-Patient Relationship? A Medical Ethics Perspective.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundArtificial Intelligence (AI) is being designed, tested, and in many cases actively employed in almost every aspect of healthcare from primary care to public health. It is by now well established that any application of AI carries an attendant responsibility to consider the ethical and societal aspects of its development, deployment and impact. However, in the rapidly developing field of AI, developments such as machine learning, neural networks, generative AI, and large language models have the potential to raise new and distinct ethical and social issues compared to, for example, automated data processing or more 'basic' algorithms.
methodsThis article presents a scoping review of the ethical and social issues pertaining to AI in healthcare, with a novel two-pronged design. One strand of the review (SR1) consists of a broad review of the academic literature restricted to a recent timeframe (2021-23), to better capture up to date developments and debates. The second strand (SR2) consists of a narrow review, limited to prior systematic and scoping reviews on the ethics of AI in healthcare, but extended over a longer timeframe (2014-2024) to capture longstanding and recurring themes and issues in the debate. This strategy provides a practical way to deal with an increasingly voluminous literature on the ethics of AI in healthcare in a way that accounts for both the depth and evolution of the literature.
resultsSR1 captures the heterogeneity of audience, medical fields, and ethical and societal themes (and their tradeoffs) raised by AI systems. SR2 provides a comprehensive picture of the way scoping reviews on ethical and societal issues in AI in healthcare have been conceptualized, as well as the trends and gaps identified.
conclusionOur analysis shows that the typical approach to ethical issues in AI, which is based on the appeal to general principles, becomes increasingly unlikely to do justice to the nuances and specificities of the ethical and societal issues raised by AI in healthcare, as the technology moves from abstract debate and discussion to real world situated applications and concerns in healthcare settings.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.