Public benefit and public trust in the context of health data research and innovation
Duration and funding
2026-2029
The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
Project number: 566424244
Brief project description
This empirical bioethics project seeks to investigate, what constitutes public benefit in the context of health data use in the current digitalised era, and its relationship with public trust. It examines what benefits are generated (e.g. economic benefits, epistemic benefits), for whom (e.g. public healthcare systems, patients, industrial sector), how these benefits should be assessed and prioritised from a normative perspective (e.g. how should epistemic benefits be weighed against clinical benefits), and their relationship to public trust.
To develop a conceptually robust and empirically grounded account of public benefit in the context of health data use and articulate its connection to public trust, this project combines philosophical methods with empirical analysis of comparative case-studies from England and Germany – the countries that invented the two most common publicly-funded healthcare models.
Project lead
- Ruth Horn (PI)
- Angeliki Kerasidou (PI)