Physician employment adds a practice management stakeholder to the patient-physician encounter, a stakeholder whose financial interests differ from those of physicians in solo or group practice.
This month, AMA Journal of Ethics editor-in-chief Audiey Kao, MD, PhD, interviewed Wendy Levinson, MD, about the efforts of the Choosing Wisely initiative to foster cultural change in medicine cross-nationally by stimulating dialogue about overuse of tests and treatments
Although not everything on the Choosing Wisely lists is likely to reduce low-value care, it is a good starting point for a conversation about curtailing low-value interventions.
Meera Balasubramaniam, MD, MPH and Yesne Alici, MD
A 15-year-old advance directive made when the patient was in much better health and not updated can bring more confusion than clarity to the decision-making process.
A 15-year-old advance directive made when the patient was in much better health and not updated can bring more confusion than clarity to the decision-making process.
Ruth M. Farrell, MD, MA, Holly Pederson, MD, and Shilpa Padia, MD
Though they claim to, direct-to-consumer genetic tests may not correctly identify an individual's ancestral background, and thus may overstate or understate one's risk for heritable disease.
J. Brian Szender, MD, MS and Shashikant B. Lele, MD
The estimated reduction in risk of ovarian cancer for any woman undergoing opportunistic removal of the Fallopian tubes is up to 50 percent, but whether removal is more beneficial than ligation has not been established.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):843-848. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.stas1-1509.
In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that synthetically created DNA is patentable, but the isolation of unaltered gene sequences is not.
AMA J Ethics. 2015;17(9):849-853. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.9.hlaw1-1509.