Better Informed Consent Technology: New Tools to Protect Patient Autonomy

Join me at ICCEC on Thursday, June 11, 2026, at 2:00PM for Better Informed Consent Technology: New Tools to Protect Patient Autonomy.

My presentation shows how we should use technology better to improve informed consent.

Informed consent is the most fundamental issue in clinical ethics. Since its 1970s origins, clinicians have mostly conducted informed consent through lengthy polysyllabic discourse. But outcomes from this approach are poor. Fortunately, change is afoot. Increasingly, new technologies are facilitating better informed consent. This session reviews five new tools and colorfully explains how they improve patient understanding.

1. Virtual Reality - Virtual reality delivers information in highly immersive and realistic ways. This helps patients better appreciate the nature of their treatment options.

 

2. AI Translation – Despite legal mandates, clinicians regularly fail to use qualified interpreters when talking to patients with limited English proficiency. The latest real-time speech-to-text transcription robots enable accurate communication across language barriers.

 

3. Ambient AI – Patient adherence/compliance remains low across treatment settings. Ambient AI reduces this by facilitating plain language visit summaries. It records the visit and uses generative AI to create usable documentation.

 

4. Consent-GPT – Some clinicians are even more fully delegating consent to artificially intelligent systems. This addresses limits of human-only processes. Consent-GPT provides more systematic and up-to-date information. And it avoids time pressures because patients can consult Consent-GPT for as long as they want and whenever they want.

 

5. Patient Decision Aids – Multiple Cochrane and other systematic reviews of hundreds of studies shows that these highly visual, evidence-based educational tools dramatically improve patient understanding.

Unfortunately, adoption of these new technologies is slow. Clinical ethicists must explore ways to increase clinician uptake. It is not enough to design communication materials and best practices. To ensure patient safety and protect patient rights, we must also ensure that they get adopted and assimilated into clinician-patient encounters. It is not 1975. We must stop communicating with patients as if it were.