Geisinger’s new Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences is recruiting bioethicists and decision scientists at all faculty ranks. Although faculty in the department pursue more traditional research in their respective fields of bioethics and decision sciences — both broadly construed — the department’s unique vision is to bring these fields together to collaborate on research and other activities at the intersection of their interests, especially on studies of judgments and decision-making in the domains of health, science and innovation.
PROJECT NARRATIVE The purpose of this R25 Diversity Action Plan grant proposal is to create a program that will equip students with disabilities with mentoring, research, and curricular resources that facilitate their advancement towards becoming members of the ELSI community of scholars.
PROJECT NARRATIVE Advancements in prenatal genetic screening have significantly improved the identification of chromosomal abnormalities and heritable conditions during pregnancy, yet current standards for patient education in this domain are largely ineffective. The most effective approach to education about prenatal screening, is one-on- one genetic counseling, but due to the limited number of counselors this is not feasible, especially in rural and frontier areas.
PROJECT NARRATIVE Consumer protections are of rising importance to the sustainability of personal genomics and mobile health industries and realization of precision health, yet the extent of consumer protections available from the Federal Trade Commission (the primary federal agency in the United States responsible for ensuring online privacy and data security beyond medical settings, for the prevention of unfair and deceptive trade practices of companies that might not be governed by HIPAA, and for promoting innovation) are poorly characterized and have received surprisingly little ELSI re
PROJECT NARRATIVE More efficient ways for people to make decisions about having genetic testing are needed. We will compare use of a chatbot to standard genetic counseling in helping healthy adults in a primary care setting make informed choices. If similar, this intervention can expand access to genetic testing to achieve greater equity.
PROJECT NARRATIVE The goal of the proposed research is to investigate how clinical genomic sequencing impacts families of pediatric patients. This research will develop an empirically informed framework of normative values important to families of pediatric patients, including ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI), which will then be used to elicit preferences for features of sequencing from a nationally representative sample of parents in the US.
This lesson examines the many reasons a person may choose to learn about their genetic information. For some, a difficult-to-diagnose disease might be identified thanks to genetic testing, while others use genetics to inform what medicines might be most effective, or to learn about future generations. Students look at several different examples with the goal of considering different perspectives on the application of genetics in medicine.