As physicians we decide which tests or treatments go on the bill but have little idea how our decisions impact what patients pay. Now patients, payers, and policymakers are demanding that we consider the cost of our recommendations.
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 Richard Pan, MD, MPH, about how, as a physician and legislator, he seeks to protect public health in light of recurrent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases.
Wejdan Bagais joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Matt Christian: “Which Data Analytics Tool Should We Use to Evaluate Risk in Upstream Drug Supply Chains?”
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.
There are few situations in which the standard of care is so clear-cut as to preclude physician judgment. Assessing the degree of need (not just the standard of care) when asking a patient to spend money requires judgment.