2023 Providence Health Care's Annual Ethics Conference: Innovating Failure

What does it mean to be innovative with “failure” in health care advancement? Where does failure appear in health care innovation and advancement and what can we do with it? In what ways can errors lead to ethical issues? How can we come to recognize our missteps and transform them into positive opportunities?

Where are we seeing failures in current health care advancements? How can we pro-actively think about productive approaches to set backs or complete misses in our current innovations such as genomics, AI, responses to the public health crises, and other research projects? How can we incorporate the learning associated with our social short-falls as we work towards building an equitable health care system?

In this full-day ethics education event, a diverse group of distinguished scholars will address the topic of innovation, failures, and ethical issues in the path to advancing health care. Speakers will discuss the ethically-winding route to innovation and progress, specifically the inevitability of “failures” in health care innovation and the ethical implications of our responses to them.

This conference will explore how a progressive health care culture can constructively convert our imperfect efforts, whether missed opportunities, unintended consequences or mistakes, to propel advancements in health care. Such failures may be systemic or accidental but all reveal important information that can be leveraged to improve the lives of our patients and communities. This fascinating day will challenge you to think about failures in health care innovation to approach the ethical issues arising from them with a different perspective.