Ethics of Unsolicited Clinical Trial Recruitment via Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
Date: Wednesday, 11 February 2026
Time: 1.30pm to 5.15pm
Venue: Shaw Foundation Alumni House, Coriander Room, Level 2
About the workshop
Conducting well-designed clinical trials remains a gold standard for producing new medical knowledge and improving patient outcomes. Key to conducting those trials is the ability to efficiently identify patients who might meet the enrolment criteria, so that they can be contacted and invited to participate. The use of electronic health record (EHR) systems to do that is a promising opportunity, and such use is growing. However, there is also evidence that in many countries and institutions, there are various barriers to this practice.
One not insignificant barrier relates to the common concern that EHRs can only be used for this purpose if the people whose records are in the EHR have previously consented to that “identification” use. This workshop will delve into the ethics of this issue by exploring concerns over consent and how we might think about the appropriate use of EHRs in this context.
Who should attend
Researchers (in medicine, science, social sciences, psychology), Institutional Review Board (IRB) members and secretariat, research office professionals, academics, healthcare professionals, research funders, policymakers, advocacy groups, and students.
Programme
| Time | Activity |
Speaker & Chair | |
| 1.30pm – 2.00pm | Registration | ||
| 2.00pm – 2.30pm | Talk 1: Using Electronic Health Records to Identify Possible Participants in a Clinical Trial, without the Prior Consent of Those People? Perfectly Ethical | Speaker: Professor Jerry Menikoff Chair: Assistant Professor G. Owen Schaefer |
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| 2.30pm – 3.00pm | Talk 2: Title to be confirmed |
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| 3.00pm – 3.15pm | Combined Q&A – Open discussion with speakers |
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| 3.15pm – 3.45pm | Tea Break | ||
| 3.45pm – 4.00pm |
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| 4.00pm – 4.30pm |
Breakout Group Discussions |
Small-group reflections and sharing |
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| 4.30pm – 5.00pm |
Group Discussion |
Summaries from each group and open floor |
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| 5.00pm – 5.15pm | Feedback and Closing | ||
Speakers
Professor Jerry Menikoff
Centre for Biomedical Ethics, NUS
Jerry Menikoff is Professor of Bioethics within the Centre for Biomedical Ethics. He also is a Senior Fellow of the Faculty of Law, NUS.
Trained as an attorney and physician, he has for years worked in the field of law and bioethics. Most recently, he has been involved with the ethics and regulation of research with human beings. After being in charge of the program for protecting intramural research participants at the United States’ National Institutes of Health, he subsequently became the director of the Office for Human Research Protections.
During his 14 years in that role, he was a leader in the successful efforts to revise the U.S. regulations for protecting research participants. Many of the specific changes – including making consent forms public, eliminating duplicative reviews for multi-institutional research, and strengthening informed consent so that it better fulfilled its ethical underpinnings – were positions that he had long championed.
Among his publications are the books Law and Bioethics: An Introduction (Georgetown University Press) and What the Doctor Didn’t Say: The Hidden Truth about Medical Research (Oxford University Press).
Mr Chris Ng
Group Chief Data Governance & Protection Officer, National University Health System
Chris is a dynamic and thoughtful leader who loves tinkering with policies and processes to build data-centric organisations. In his current role as Group Chief Data Governance and Protection Officer and Chief Data Officer for the National University Health System (NUHS) of Singapore, Chris has the responsibility for ensuring that the confidentiality of NUHS patients are well-protected, while simultaneously building the capability and governance framework for the safe and innovative use of data to improve public health and patient care outcomes. Chris is also the co-chair of the NUHS AI Governance Committee.
In his two decades of professional work, Chris has helped start up data analytics teams, set effective data sharing and data protection policies for the Singapore Government and NUHS, improved the practice of data security in organisations and led the drafting of data-related legislation to enable greater data sharing in the public sector. Chris led the inter-MOHH entity effort to draft and sign a Master Data Sharing Agreement between all MOHH entities to facilitate data sharing, and the implementation of the Email and Web Data Loss Prevention in NUHS.
He is also a Certified Information Privacy Professional (Asia) and Certified Information Privacy Manager with the International Association of Privacy Professionals and has a Certification in AI Ethics and Governance with the Singapore Computer Society.
Assistant Professor G. Owen Schaefer
Centre for Biomedical Ethics, NUS
Dr. G. Owen Schaefer was appointed Assistant Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in 2020. He is currently Director of the Phase II Health ethics, Law and Professionalism (HeLP) curriculum. Owen’s research interests cover ethical issues raised by the development of novel biotechnologies.
Before beginning his graduate work, Owen spent two years at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the US as a pre-doctoral fellow. There, he received training in research ethics, was involved in the department’s ethics consultation service, and published several academic articles. He then went on to read for BPhil and DPhil degrees in philosophy at Oxford, writing a dissertation on moral enhancement. Immediately prior to joining the CBmE, he spent a year as a post-doc at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics researching the implications of various novel biotechnologies.
Owen joined CBmE in August 2015 under the MOH-funded initiative, Clinical Ethics Network + Research Ethics Support (CENTRES). In January 2018 he switched roles to be a Research Assistant Professor under the Science, Health And Policy-Relevant Ethics in Singapore (SHAPES) initiative at CBmE, funded by a grant from the NMRC, before taking up his present role as Assistant Professor in July 2020.
Continuing Professional Education
| Profession | Points Earned |
|---|---|
| Doctors | Up to 2 non-core CME points (i.e., not MME points) |
| Nurses | Up to 2 CPE points |
| Pharmacists | Up to 2 CPE points |
Venue
Shaw Foundation Alumni House (SFAH) Level 2, Coriander Room, 11 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119244
The closest parking is available at NUS Carpark 15, located just across the road from SFAH.
Contact
For more information, please email us at fion.lai@nus.edu.sg (Ms Fion Lai) and alexa.nb@nus.edu.sg (Dr Alexa Nord-Bronzyk).