American health care is rife with inequity in access to services. Even among people with insurance, inequity can result from insurers’ decisions about which services to cover. These decisions are often based on economic models that are seemingly objective but…
Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) provides a formal assessment of trade-offs involving benefits, harms, and costs inherent in alternative options. CEA has been increasingly used to inform public and private organizations’ reimbursement decisions, benefit designs, and price negotiations worldwide. Despite the lack…
This article offers examples of how modeling can motivate health equity inquiry and research. This article also considers how equity fits into cost-effectiveness frameworks, how economic modeling can broaden the range of options for improving health equity, and how information…
Nosocomial infections are public health threats with often grave human costs. Because implementing screening and best outbreak response practices is costly for health care organizations, allocating resources for interventions requires consensus among stakeholders with a plurality of perspectives about how…
Novel interventions that are effective and safe but costly suggest the importance of questions about value, accessibility, and affordability. Economic evaluation is one useful tool that health care systems draw upon to help make investment decisions and set priorities. But…
Physicians’ primary responsibility is to promote patients’ well-being, which includes not causing financial harm. Physicians also have duties to prudently steward health care resources. Balancing these responsibilities requires recommending interventions likely to achieve patients’ health goals while avoiding unnecessary expenditures….
Before updating any willingness-to-pay (WTP) per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) threshold, a few points must be recognized. Ethical justification for using WTP thresholds and QALYs lies in incorporating the preferences of those whose treatment could be affected by resulting resource allocations….
This commentary on a case considers a transgender patient’s mental health and risk for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in ethical decision making about feminizing gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT). Key considerations when beginning GAHT include recognizing that venous thromboembolism risk may…
Trauma-informed care is a transdisciplinary framework that existed well before 2020, but it is now more imperative to teach it and incorporate it into medical education. This paper describes a novel interprofessional curriculum and its focus on trauma-informed care notably,…
Social determinants of health are increasingly recognized as important factors in individual and public health outcomes and are therefore of interest to both health care systems and medical schools. However, teaching holistic assessment strategies during clinical education remains a challenge….
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