Health Care Ethics USA

September 10, 2026

The Seventh Annual Catholic Healthcare Innovation in Ethics Forum

The Seventh Annual Catholic Healthcare Innovation in Ethics Forum (CHIEF) was hosted virtually in September 2025 by SSM Health. This year's conference successfully accomplished CHIEF's mission: to provide a dynamic forum for ethicists to exchange innovative ideas and promote effective integration of ethics in Catholic healthcare. The conference was coordinated by the CHIEF planning committee that consisted of membership representing Catholic healthcare. Members were ethicists from SSM Health, Hospital Sisters Health System, CommonSpirit Health, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, Mercy, OSF Healthcare, Ascension, and Intermountain Health.

September 10, 2026

The Via Media and the Profession of Catholic Healthcare Ethics

It was an honor and privilege to have been invited to give the keynote presentation for the 2025 CHIEF conference on September 10th. Several conference participants suggested that I submit a summary to HCEUSA and I am happy to do so. The Planning Committee made many helpful suggestions, including that I reflect on learnings from my career in Catholic healthcare ethics, the prophetic role of the ethicist in Catholic healthcare, my approach to working with bishops, some areas of concern in Catholic healthcare ethics, and to speak to the importance of theoretical endeavors in the work of Catholic healthcare ethicists.

September 10, 2026

Care Coordination for Ethics Consults: Strategy of Care Notes and Best Practices

The Strategy of Care (SOC) note in Epic is a powerful tool designed to address critical concerns that impact patient care in the acute setting while supporting continuity of care after discharge. By standardizing documentation, SOC notes help reduce provider variability in common areas such as pain management, patient nonadherence, or refusal of essential diagnostics and treatments. They also ensure consistency in goals of care when providers transition on and off service, creating a unified approach across the care team.

September 09, 2026

Toward a New Art of Dying, ACP and Catholic Healthcare

Catholic healthcare finds itself in a unique position within the healthcare space because of its multi-faceted commitments to providing healthcare to all but also keeping itself accountable to the internal morality of the Catholic tradition. Because of this, Catholic healthcare has a unique perspective into the patient-provider relationship. Of note, there is a foundational commitment to serve all in all aspects, physical, mental and spiritual based in the Catholic-Christian example of Christ's healing ministry.

September 09, 2026

Ethics in the Foundation: A Philanthropic Discernment Aid

Philanthropic Support Foundations provide a crucial service for our ministries and local communities by managing charitable gifts and building relationships with donors. Aligning resources with needs fulfills a key part of our Mission as a Catholic health ministry. Yet, some gifts or donors do not completely align with our Mission. We created the Philanthropic Discernment Aid to help address such situations of misalignment and to assess potential gifts or donors through the lens of our Mission and Catholic identity. The tool helps gift officers and foundation leadership: (1) assess if the misalignment is acceptable or if the gift should not proceed; (2) mitigate individual bias; and (3) determine whether they should contact someone else to help assess the situation. We hope this tool will help foundations and ethicists at other Catholic health systems think through similar situations.

September 09, 2026

The IRB As a Guardrail for Healthcare AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare has significant promise, potentially allowing earlier disease detection, expanded access to care, and reduced administrative burden on clinicians. For Catholic and other mission-driven healthcare systems, this seems providential: technology that advances access for the poor and vulnerable and improves care for all. Yet medical breakthroughs have often produced novel moral hazards. AI is no exception.

September 09, 2026

Unrepresented Patient Ethics Consultations: An Integrated Process for Decision-making When a Patient's Voice is Absent

Over the past several years organizations across the country have experienced a growing number of patients who are determined by their providers to lack capacity and who, at the same time, do not have an identified decision-making representative. These patients are often referred to as "Unrepresented Patients" (or "Unbefriended Patients", though respect for their dignity and personhood compels the shift in vocabulary to the more compassionate language of "Unrepresented" vs. "Unbefriended"). They are, indeed, one of our most vulnerable patient groups since their voices are nearly or completely absent in conversations about their treatment goals, perceptions of risks and benefits, and values and preferences.

September 09, 2026

Re-Imagining Ethics Education: A New Approach to the Clinical Ethics Intensive

As healthcare systems navigate increasingly complex clinical environments, the need for intentional and proactive ethics has become central to high-quality care. In response to this need, Ascension has undertaken a comprehensive re-imagining of how it trains Ethics Integration Committee (EIC) members to participate meaningfully in proactive clinical ethics processes. This work culminated in a redesigned version of the Clinical Ethics Intensive (CEI), Ascension's flagship ethics education program.

September 09, 2026

A Ministry-Wide Policy for Potentially Medically Inappropriate Care: One Year of Challenges and Successes

It is a scenario familiar to clinical ethicists: a consultation from the Intensive Care Unit where a patient has had a long, protracted hospitalization and is not improving, despite all interventions. A provider may characterize the care as "futile" but feels some obligation to continue because "it is what the family wants." Mercy has worked over the past two years to implement a ministry-wide policy to help adjudicate medical care requests from patients or their surrogate decision makers when the care team no longer feels comfortable providing that specific medical intervention. This article is to summarize what has been effective with the policy's implementation and identify the challenges that remain.

September 09, 2026

An Exploration of Ableism in Healthcare Resource Allocation

When healthcare resources become scarce and providers must choose who receives treatment, the Hippocratic principle of Justice is often the most difficult to honor. Clinicians may turn to decision-making algorithms in hopes of minimizing personal bias, but these tools inevitably introduce the biases of their creators.