AMA Journal of Ethics

This month on Ethics Talk, Dr Sheryl Fleisch discusses strategies for delivering health services to people experiencing homelessness, including street psychiatry.

Heightened caution, improved physician and patient communication, and equitable access are key priorities.

Beatrice L. Brown joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article, coauthored with Dr Aaron S Kesselheim: "How Should Clinicians and Organizations Assess Risks and Benefits of First-in-Human Implantation of Investigational Devices?"

Physicians’ primary responsibility is to promote patients’ well-being, which includes not causing financial harm.

Modeling how technology assessment fits into cost-effectiveness frameworks can broaden the range of options for improving health equity.

Insurers’ decisions about which services to cover are often based on economic models that are seemingly objective but neglect factors affecting people who are economically disadvantaged.

Elina E. Pliakos and Dr Ankur Pandya join Ethics Talk to discuss how economic decision modeling and value analyses can help reduce waste in health care spending and improve patient care.

Novel interventions that are effective and safe but costly suggest the importance of questions about value, accessibility, and affordability.

Allocating resources for interventions requires consensus among stakeholders with a plurality of perspectives about how to weigh antimicrobial stewardship interventions’ risks and benefits.

A wire, plaster, and wood sculpture of a DNA double helix with one mismatched base pair considers how we might justly weigh overall health equity against extremely costly interventions for uncommon genetic illnesses.