By COLLEEN SCHRAPPEN and LISA EISENHAUER
Kevin Murphy says he was looking for a way to create health care ethics education that was available anytime and anywhere when he came up with the idea for a podcast.
That, in short, is how EthicsLab was born two years ago in a recording studio in Englewood, Colo., with a support team from what was then Catholic Health Initiatives. The monthly production features national and international guests providing knowledge and tools to respond to some of the more challenging issues in clinical ethics, including by identifying the common ground shared by the Catholic ethical and social justice tradition and public debate on health care ethics issues.
Kevin Murphy, right, interviews Brian Yanofchick for a podcast. Murphy is senior vice president of mission innovation, theology and ethics at CommonSpirit Health and host of its EthicsLab and other podcasts. Yanofchick is chief sponsorship officer, Atlantic Group, for Bon Secours Mercy Health. Courtesy CommonSpirit Health
Murphy taps leaders both within and outside of Catholic health care ethics as podcast guests. Each EthicsLab episode has discussions by a panel of subject experts who offer practical advice and tools to improve patient care and frame what Murphy calls "tough choice ethical challenges." Titles of EthicsLab episodes include "Organ Donation: Foundational Ethical Approaches," "Human Trafficking" and "Moral Distress and Moral Resiliency."
Murphy says he strives to make the podcast conversations relevant and inclusive of those who come from a diversity of backgrounds. "Any conversation on human dignity crosses whatever tradition or experience you may come from," he says.
The podcast "gives us that ability to interview and engage high-quality experts on various issues and make it really accessible to listeners," says Murphy, who is senior vice president of mission innovation, theology and ethics at CommonSpirit Health. That ministry system formed in January 2019 from a merger of CHI and Dignity Health.
The podcast has even spawned an offshoot called EthicsLab Essentials that, paired with a discussion guide created by a team of ethicists from CHI and five other ministry health systems, can provide continuing medical education credit for doctors and continuing education unit credit for other health care professionals.
Bridging traditions
Initially envisioned as a way to educate clinicians and administrators within CHI on ethical issues, EthicsLab has attracted a global audience via the Internet, Murphy says. Analytics show people in Canada, Australia, Germany and India are listening. "We didn't expect or plan for that," he says.
Hibner
Downloads of the podcasts went from a trickle in the first few months to the low thousands per episode by early October, says co-producer Russell Keithline. Murphy credits timely topics, articulate experts and positive word-of-mouth in professional networks for the steady climb in listenership.
Nate Hibner, a director of ethics at CHA, says he sees two specific benefits to having a podcast that delves into ethics in Catholic health care: bridge-building and awareness-raising.
A podcast can connect people involved in and affected by health care decisions — patients, providers and ethics committees — who may not always understand each other's concerns. "A podcast could be used as a starting point for education on difficult subjects," Hibner says.
And, for ethicists in Catholic health care, those subjects are expanding beyond clinical health care into socioeconomic factors that help explain why the poor have worse health outcomes, says Fr. Charles Bouchard, CHA's senior director of theology and sponsorship and a past guest of the podcast.
Fr. Bouchard
"In the past, we just focused on taking care of sick people. Now we look at the root causes of chronic illnesses, and can we prevent them in the first place? We focus on the socioeconomic determinants of health — poverty, racism, lack of education — and how they contribute to bad health," says
Fr. Bouchard.
Technological and scientific advances in medicine introduce a host of issues to consider, including genetic medicine and genetic counseling.
"Podcasts can offer a new dimension in the continuing education of ethics," Fr. Bouchard says. "It's a more user-friendly way of extending the ethics function into a bigger group of people. We're all going to face these ethical decisions, and this makes ethical questions accessible to everyone."
Essentials of ethics
Keithline and Murphy say they've taken cues from listener surveys and other sources of feedback to choose topics, shorten the episodes from 50 to 35 minutes and develop the EthicsLab Essentials offshoot.
EthicsLab Essentials is a series of 30-minute podcasts that cover what Murphy calls "foundational topics" in health care ethics and provide a starting point for a comprehensive "core curriculum" for ethics committee members and clinicians.
"EthicsLab Essentials is the attempt to try to offer foundational education," Murphy says. "So, if you're a clinician who wants to brush up, or if you're a new member of an ethics committee, in those 12 episodes it will give you a good diversity of issues to brush up on so that you're more knowledgeable and able to impact your care or your work."
Murphy worked with four "lead contributors" to create the EthicsLab Essentials podcasts: Rachelle Barina, Wisconsin regional vice president of mission integration at SSM Health; Becket Gremmels, system director of ethics for CHRISTUS Health; Mark Repenshek, vice president, ethics and church relations for Ascension; and Alan Sanders, vice president of ethics integration & strategy at Trinity Health.
The EthicsLab Essentials podcasts will be reviewed for potential updates every year or two, Keithline says, but the goal has been to frame content that has enduring relevance. The production team created pre- and post-listening testing materials to be used in conjunction with each episode, which allow for the continuing medical education accreditation of EthicsLab Essentials.
In addition to helping educate medical professionals, Murphy says the episodes and the tools that pair with them — such as study guides and links to relevant sites and sources on the Internet — are being used by ethics committees at hospitals to spur discussions.
Murphy doesn't rule out additional related ventures or changes to existing formats as producers incorporate constructive feedback from guests and listeners. "We're always trying to be in conversation with listeners to understand what's the next evolution that's going to be helpful," he says.
All episodes of EthicsLab and EthicsLab Essentials can be streamed at missiononline.net or downloaded through platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Google Play.