Medical Ethics Advisor
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Physician Selling Practice? Ethical Guidance Is Needed
As healthcare in America continues to consolidate, private independent practices or solo practitioners are fewer in number. A growing number of physicians are selling their practices to private equity firms or other buyers, raising ethical concerns.
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Pediatric Ethics Consults Differ in the Outpatient vs. Inpatient Setting
When consulting on pediatric cases in the outpatient setting, ethicists see distinct issues compared to the inpatient setting, a recent study found.
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Ethics Consult Requestors Validate Value of Ethicists, Voice Concerns About Access
What is the value of an ethics consultation? Clinical areas rely on hard data, such as an increase in the percentage of patients receiving medication in a specific timeframe, to demonstrate quality. For ethics, a “good” consult is much harder to define and is talked about in terms of qualitative, rather than quantitative, data.
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Ethical Approaches Can Protect Patients from Financial Harm
When patients cannot afford medications, clinicians face a challenging ethical dilemma.
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Clinicians Reach Out to Both Chaplains and Ethicists
Ethicists can take the opportunity to partner with chaplains when meeting with families or caregivers to listen, explore, and support.
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Ethics of Informed Consent for Randomized Comparative Effectiveness Studies
Randomized comparative effectiveness studies often compare treatments within the standard of care to determine which is better for patients. When research and clinical care are combined in this way, healthcare providers can be confused about what is required in terms of obtaining consent for enrollment in the research study.
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Implementation Research Raises Unique Ethical Questions
Implementation research improves the adoption of evidence-based interventions in actual clinical practice. Lack of guidance from existing ethics frameworks makes it difficult for implementation science researchers to anticipate what will be ethically problematic.
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Ethical Concerns with Crowdfunding for Organ Transplantation
Even if insurance covers some or most of the cost of an organ transplant, recipients (and to a lesser extent, donors) can face a significant financial burden. Financial expenses surrounding organ transplantation are motivating some recipients to raise money through medical crowdfunding.
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Ethical Debate over Research on Enhancement of Brain Function
Technology is advancing rapidly for enhancement of brain function in healthy people, but remains ethically controversial.
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Ethical Concerns with Large Language Models in Surgery
Large language models (LLMs) in surgery have the potential to enhance decision-making, documentation, and patient engagement. However, the body of literature addressing the ethical concerns of applying LLMs in surgical settings is relatively limited.