Dr. Charles E. Binkley, MD, FACS, HEC-C, Director of AI Ethics and Quality

Dr. Charles E. Binkley is an experienced hepatobiliary and pancreas surgeon, bioethicist, and healthcare quality leader. Dr. Binkley attended Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he was a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, and completed his surgery training at the University of Michigan, where he was awarded an NIH fellowship in gastrointestinal surgery and pancreatic cancer research.

Dr Binkley is the Director of Bioethics at Hackensack Meridian Health and Associate Professor of Surgery at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. Before his current position, Dr Binkley practised hepatobiliary and pancreas surgery at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco, California, where he was also Chair of the Bioethics Committee, President of the Medical Staff, and Chief of Inpatient Quality. Dr Binkley was also Director of Bioethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics in Silicon Valley, where he still holds the honorary title of Bioethics Fellow.

His academic research is focused on ethical issues impacting surgeons and surgical care and Artificial Intelligence systems which support clinical decisions, particularly the need to inform patients, shared machine-physician agency, and assigning moral responsibility for AI-guided clinical decisions.

Dr Binkley has served on the Committee on Ethical, Legal, and Judicial Affairs of the California Medical Association, the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Medical Society, Hackensack Meridian Health’s Predictive Health Working Group, and the admissions committee at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and is certified by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities as a Healthcare Ethics Consultant.

Dr Binkley’s work has appeared in Cancer Research, Annals of Surgery, The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Surgery, AMA Journal of Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics, and Verdict.