As larger organizations become more influential in the health care sector, the Code can help physicians navigate those organizations’ influence on their practices.
Upcoding and misrepresenting clinical information constitute fraud, cost a lot, and can result in patient harm and unnecessary procedures and prescriptions.
Corporatization in health care has complicated clinicians’ and organizations’ efforts to balance interests of individual patients against an organization’s bottom line.
Proliferation of innovative procedures and treatments in surgery has led to novel and distinct ethical challenges. Medicine can learn from plastic surgeons’ approaches to informed consent and potentially harmful treatments.
The question of whether and how results from personal genetic testing will motivate behavioral changes in consumers has only begun to receive the research attention it richly deserves.
Kyle B. Brothers, MD, PhD and Esther E. Knapp, MD, MBE
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing requires that physicians share decision making with patients, not order unnecessary tests or interventions, and refer to genetic specialists when necessary.