Survey of faculty physicians at the University of Pennsylvania led to a list of proposals for health care reforms beyond those included in the Affordable Care Act.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(7):680-688. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.7.sect2-1507.
Thomas W. LeBlanc, MD, MA and Amy P. Abernethy, MD, PhD
One strategy to promote adherence is the use of “care pathways,” effectively roadmaps that seek to standardize cancer treatment on the basis of some agreed-upon set of guidelines within a particular center or group of patients.
Medical specialty boards improve the quality and safety of health care, but they can overreach, and their board members express disapproval of board action by petition and through legal action.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):193-198. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.spec1-1503.
Doctors and hospitals must stop being bystanders to food-related illness and begin to become role models and educators in the transition to healthful eating habits, just as they did in tobacco cessation.
Clinicians' reluctance to engage in environmental interventions for children's psychiatric illnesses, which may seem to implicate parents, may stem from a desire to stand apart from mid-twentieth-century psychiatrists who blamed mothers for pediatric mental illness.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Dorothy E. Roberts, JD
The call for structural competency encourages medicine to broaden its approach to matters of race and culture so that it might better address both individual-level doctor and patient characteristics and institutional factors.
The future success of the Affordable Care Act depends on doctors' willingness to take the lead in identifying reforms that will lead to high-quality, cost-effective health care.