Genevieve S. Silva joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Cassandra Thiel: “What Would It Mean for Health Care Organizations to Justly Manage Their Waste?”
Good design can help transform health care, in part because it involves drawing on a wide range of perspectives and experiences. This month, we talked with a health care designer, a patient advocate, and a physician to learn how “design thinking” can be successfully incorporated into health care systems and applications.
Each time an imaging study is ordered, radiologists must ask whether exposure to radiation is warranted. Imaging should not be performed to avoid litigation, for financial gain, to reach a quota, when the outcome clearly will not affect the treatment plan, or because the patient’s family demands it.
Caregivers often think that so-called “frequent-flyer” patients are at fault for their poor medical outcomes. In many such cases, though, unaddressed psychosocial issues are the root of the patients’ repeat visits to the emergency department.
The greatest pressure to resuscitate the extremely low-birth-weight infant often results from successful marketing efforts that lead families to expect that their premature infants will be cute and healthy.
Physicians new to a case might object to an established care plan. Practice variation, clinical momentum, and how value is assigned by different parties to acute care and comfort measures can each contribute to conflict in these cases.
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E699-707. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.699.
Sabhyta Sabharwal, MPH, Jason W. Mitchell, PhD, MPH, and Victoria Y. Fan, ScD, SM
The World Health Organization and American Academy of Pediatrics recommend disclosing serostatus to sexually active adolescents. What else can be done to improve clinical outcomes and promote public health?
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(8):E743-749. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2018.743.