13.C. Workshop: Epistemic and ethical innovations in public health research

Abstract

Abstract About 90% of the biomedical data accessible to researchers was created in the last two years. These data have a very meaningful impact both in creating public policies on health, as well as public health research. This certainly implies complex technical problems on how to store, analyse and distribute data, but it also brings relevant epistemological issues. In this workshop we will present some of such problems and discuss how epistemic innovation is key in order to tackle ethical issues related to the use of big data in public health research. Databases implied in public health research are so huge that they rise relevant questions about how scientific method is applied, such as what counts as evidence of a hypothesis when data can not be directly apprehended by humans, how to distinguish correlation from causation, or in which cases the provider of a database can be considered co-author of a research paper. To consider such issues nowadays, current protocols do not hold, and we need innovation in methodological and epistemic procedures. At the same time, due to the fact that a relevant deal of such biomedical data is linked to individual people, and how medical data can be used to predict and transform human behavior, there are ethical questions difficult to solve as they imply new challenges. Some of them are related to communication issues, so patients and citizens understand these new ethical problems that didn't arise before the development of big data; others relate to the way in which public health researchers can and can't store, analyse and distribute information, and some others relate to the limits on which technologies are ethically, safe and which ones bring erosion of basic human rights. The four contributions in the workshop analyse these questions in some detail. During the workshop we will present a coherent understanding on what is epistemic innovation, some logical tools necessary for its development, and then we will discuss several cases on how epistemic innovation applies to different aspects of public health research, also commenting its relevance when tackling ethical problems that may arise. Key messages The workshop deepens the ethical and epistemological innovations involved in public health policies and research, specially related to big data. The workshop analyses novel aspects of public health ethics