Director
Gundersen Health System
LaCrosse, Wisconsin
Thomas (Tom) Harter, PhD, is the Director of the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at Emplify Health by Gundersen in La Crosse, WI. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Tennessee, specializing in medical ethics and business ethics. Dr. Harter also completed the 2-year Cleveland Fellowship in Advance Bioethics (CFAB), learning the skills used in clinical ethics consultation and empirical bioethics research. Dr. Harter provides ethics education programs for house staff, medical students, nursing students, and physician assistant students, and in-services and workshops for the medical staff, nursing staff, social workers, and the pastoral care department. Dr. Harter chairs both the Emplify-Gundersen Institutional Review Board and the Emplify-Gundersen Ethics Committee. In these roles, Dr. Harter helps develop institutional policies and practices, staff education, and patient/community education with special focuses on advance care planning, community engagement, and medico-industry relationships. Dr. Harter’s research on ethical issues that arise at the intersection of business, medical professionalism, and patient care has resulted in numerous peer-reviewed conference presentations and articles. He serves as the President-elect of the Bioethics Network of the Upper Midwest (BENUM) (2024-2026), as facilitator of the Ethics Roundtable for the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative and is the co-chair of the Wisconsin POST coalition. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming textbook, Medical Professionalism: Theory, Education, and Practice (anticpated Fall 2024) (Oxford University Press), in which he also authored a chapter on professionalism through the lens of physicians as employees.
Virtual
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
