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.
How can clinicians respond to the alarmingly high rates of maternal mortality in the U.S., and address racial disparities between black and white mothers? This month on Ethics Talk, we discuss how clinicians can improve maternal outcomes.
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.
AMA Journal of Ethics' editor Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Kenneth Sands, MD, about harms to patient dignity caused by unintentional disrespect and about initiatives for measuring, tracking, and correcting such harms.
The casebook developed by the Bander Center for Medical Business Ethics provides a comprehensive instrument for teaching medical business ethics decision making by exploring the effects of relevant variables on medical practice and research and reflecting on the values and motives that influence the behavior of health care professionals.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(8):744-749. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.8.medu1-1508.
The case of Johnson v Kokemoor illuminates the conflict between patients’ right to informed consent and clinicians’ need to learn through practice, a conflict that possibly could be resolved through greater transparency about clinicians’ experience or experience-dependent medical fees.
The Anesthesiology Quality Institute contributes both to local quality improvement in the practice of anesthesiology through data collection and establishment of benchmarks and to patient safety in partnership with the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(3):248-252. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.3.pfor1-1503.