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.
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.
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.
Payments made to physicians by pharmaceutical companies may undermine the trust of patients and the general public in medicine and science, according to Henk ten Have, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Healthcare Ethics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Physicians misrepresented their credentials online, violated patient confidentiality, had inappropriate communications with patients online, and used the Internet to prescribe medications to patients with whom they had no therapeutic relationship, according to a study of violations reported to state medical boards.1
In recent years, there has been a push for hospitals to receive organs from donors who are not technically brain dead.
In a commentary on the biosecurity controversy surrounding publication of bird flu research details, a bioethicist and a vaccine expert at Johns Hopkins reaffirm that "all scientists have an affirmative ethical obligation to avoid contributing to the advancement of biowarfare and bioterrorism," but that there are not sufficient structures in place to evaluate potential societal risks.
Add another voice to the national conversation on improving protection of research participants: The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which recently released its recommendations for reforming federal oversight of human subjects' research.
On Nov. 24, 2009, President Obama established The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to advise him on bioethical issues generated by novel and emerging research in biomedicine and related areas of science and technology.
The U.S. Supreme Court has recently thrown out a lower court ruling that allows human genes to be patented. This topic is of great importance to cancer researchers, patients, and drugmakers.
