Is this a conflict over a team member’s practice style or is it a breach professional boundaries? Is it appropriate for team members to make this judgment, or should it instead come from the team leader?
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
Physicians working in close-knit communities, whether small towns or urban neighborhoods, have to manage relationships with people who may be simultaneously patients and neighbors, friends, and business associates.
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.