Trusted & trustworthy
At Koa Health, we believe that being trusted and trustworthy is critical to our mission to help people improve their health, and that being ethical underpins this trust.
Ethical mental health solutions
Our ethical principles
On acting ethically
Our ethical principles, shared below, draw from national and international ethics framework.
- Improving your health and happiness
- Putting you in control
- Being understandable and transparent
- Securing your data
- Being accountable
Our approach to ethics
Ethics is intrinsic to issues of health and healthy behaviours. This is especially true when providing advice on what to do. Because even as we ensure that our recommendations are as evidenced-based as possible, there will be occasions where it will not be obvious what the "right" answer is.
This is not because the evidence is wrong, but because people can have competing priorities, for example getting extra sleep vs. rising early to squeeze in some exercise before work.
Lessons learned
On evolving and learning in ethics and beyond
Koa Health has invested over 10,000 working hours and €1 million in our comprehensive ethics strategy. We’ve developed and tested a range of ideas, undergone two external ethics audits, and have already experienced a few challenges. Four are highlighted in this section.
- Principles can conflict.
We saw this acutely during the audit of a prototype app. Our focus on privacy was so strong that we had no direct data to draw on to understand if our recommendation algorithm might be biased. This demonstrated to us that early consideration of potential conflict between ethical principles is essential.
- To a certain extent, delivery is all or nothing.
It’s not possible to be 60% or 80% ethical; in setting out multiple ethical principles we must address all of them at the same time. This is obviously true of our approach to understandability and transparency, two principles that are intrinsically linked.
- Balancing realism and ambition is challenging.
While we want to be ambitious, we also want to be realistic. To strike the right balance, our commitments are a mix of ideas that are currently implementable alongside more challenging initiatives that will require further research and substantial effort to deliver.
- There’s still so much to learn
Thus far, no society has developed a set of norms to ensure technology’s optimum functionality for everyone. With so much that remains unknown in the application of digital technology and machine learning to health, we’re sure we’ll need to evolve our approach as we experiment and learn.