Volk v DeMeerleer may conflict with professional guidelines regarding physicians’ obligations to breach patient confidentiality to protect third parties.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(1):10-18. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.1.peer2-1801.
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.
Amy Barnhorst, MD, Garen Wintemute, MD, MPH, and Marian E. Betz, MD, MPH
When mandatory reporting of risk of violence is not required, physicians should balance patient autonomy and beneficence with patient and public safety.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(1):29-35. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2018.20.1.ecas1-1801.
The physician must consider the potential benefits of the new procedure and then determine, through discussion with the patient, what value the patient places on those specific benefits.
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.