The addition of IT to our health care system should not be viewed as merely a technological upgrade, but rather a fundamental change in our approach to the practice of medicine.
Survey of faculty physicians at the University of Pennsylvania led to a list of proposals for health care reforms beyond those included in the Affordable Care Act.
AMA J Ethics. 2015; 17(7):680-688. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2015.17.7.sect2-1507.
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.
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.
William Martinez, MD, MS and Thomas H. Gallagher, MD
Running away from the problems and inefficiencies of our current health care system and into the comforts of concierge medicine does little to advance health and well-being for the vast majority of people.
Publicizing physician ordering information as a way of peer-pressuring hospital employees into cutting costs is likely to have unintended consequences.
The use of coded patient data for reimbursement purposes can tempt clinicians to exaggerate the severity of the patient's condition, skewing the accuracy of the data and interfering with clinical decision support and research.
Rachel O. Reid, MD, MS and Ateev Mehrotra, MD, MPH
An effective policy regarding retail clinics in a primary care practice should address patients' need for timely and convenient acute care and build capacity for enhanced access to acute care within the primary care clinic itself.
Use of decision-support systems can improve quality of patient care in residency training programs if the resident physician users participate in the development and routine revision of those systems.