Innovations in health care tend to exacerbate health inequity nationally and internationally. New drugs, devices, or procedures that have been developed and tested in the global south, for example, inequitably distribute risk in already under-resourced regions of the world and generally confer benefits to resource-richer patients and communities of the global north. Even when developed in the global north alone, persons already on the top rungs of the health/wealth gradient enjoy benefits of health service delivery streams most deftly equipped to integrate, monetize, and bring innovations’ benefits to lucrative health care marketplaces. Even in ethics we tend to define innovations in terms of how well they, in hindsight, marry end user demand with technological opportunity, instead of in terms of how efficiently and effectively they perpetuate or remediate widely documented inequity or satiate need. If risk-benefit distributions and maldistributions were to become part of how we determine whether and to what extent something counts as an innovation, we could better evaluate if and when global health science-to-global health service development pathways are just. This theme issue considers how a variety of processes of biomedical advancement—not only research and development—prompt us to ask What should be ethical requirements of what constitutes an innovation in health care?
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this January 2027 issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 28 February 2026.
The AMA Journal of Ethics® invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.