Measuring outcomes alone is not the answer. There should be a way to reward the doctor for educating a patient about lifestyle modifications and then documenting that the care provided followed patient preferences.
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.
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.
Geoff Hollett, PhD and Jennie B. Jarrett, PharmD, PhD, MMedEd
The Strategic National Stockpile is a national system maintained by the US federal government to deliver medical supplies during emergencies, and it needs administrative changes.
AMA J Ethics. 2024;26(4):E315-320. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2024.315.