Dr Nisha M. Patel joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Drs Jesse M. Ehrenfeld and Brian J. Miller: “What Should ‘Shopping’ Look Like in Actual Practice?”

John Meyer joins Ethics Talk to discuss how “human-centered” design can help remove barriers to care and forge solidarity between patients and clinicians, and multidisciplinary artist Eve Payor talks about her projects with the Atlantic Center for the Arts and how soundscape ecology can help us understand effective sound design in health care settings.

These key steps are ones health sector stakeholders should take to help patients and clinicians use pricing information to inform health decision making.

For dying patients and their loved ones to make informed decisions, physicians must share adequate information about prognoses, prospective benefits and harms of specific interventions, and costs.

Online tools intended to make health care purchasing resemble “consumerism” have had little effect on improving transparency for patients.

Negative health consequences from costly care are referred to as financial toxicity and should be included in informed consent discussions.

More transparent pricing would allow patients and families to make better decisions, but there are limitations to how reliably it promotes efficiency and market discipline.

Fragmentation in US health care delivery streams and shortcomings in formal quality measures mean that transparency could be more useful to policymakers and regulators than patients.

This article analyzes differences in prescription drug pricing transparency practices among 3 Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development member nations.

This watercolor visually considers which values our words and actions endorse.