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As it stands now, only hospital patients discharged to a home setting complete the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey - not patients who are discharged to a nursing home or rehab, or family members of patients who died in the hospital.
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Options for a cataract patient might include a monofocal lens that will require the use of glasses, or a multifocal intraocular lens that might not, but carries the risk of side effects such as glares and halos.
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If a genetic test reveals a patient is at high risk for cancer, the ordering physician may think it's important for this information to be shared with others in the family, but the patient may think otherwise.
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Careful stewardship of scarce resources remains an ethical obligation of physicians, but avoiding harm to patients is a higher priority, argues Howard Brody, MD, PhD, John P. McGovern Centennial Chair in Family Medicine and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
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Low-income patients are less likely to sue physicians than patients with higher incomes, according to an analysis of litigation rates and medical malpractice claims.
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Over half (55%) of physicians told a patient that his or her prognosis was more positive than the medical facts warranted within the previous year, according to a survey conducted in 2009 of almost 2,000 physicians in seven specialties.
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One out of 10 physicians said they had told a patient something untrue in the previous year, according to a 2009 survey of 1,891 practicing physicians nationwide.1
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When physicians were first using the Internet to do e-prescribing back in the 1990s, this led to the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) forming a committee to define a physician-patient relationship, recalls Humayun J. Chaudhry, DO, MS, FACP, FACOI, the FSMB's president and CEO.
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Some commonly used diagnostic tests or treatments do not benefit patients, according to the ABIM Foundation's "Choosing Wisely" initiative. "This is not about 'rationing' care," says Christine K. Cassel, MD, president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation.
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When a patient is communicating with a provider online, it is "quite easy for a physician to cross ethical boundaries that are inherent to the physician-patient relationship," says Toby Schonfeld, PhD, associate professor of medicine and director of the master of arts in bioethics program at the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta.
