Dr Ariane Lewis discusses how we can navigate uncertainty and ambiguity about brain death by understanding clinical criteria for brain death determination and how our approaches to death are culturally and socially situated.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.
The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.