The difficult science you might not know--but should

An AMA Viewpoints post by AMA Board of Trustees Chair Stephen R. Permut, MD As a future physician, you’ll be pulled in many directions. Your medical skills will be tested, you’ll need to think on your feet, and you’ll need to make decisions that will affect your patients’ well-being and health outcomes. But how will you know whether you’re making the right decisions? To be a successful physician in practice, you’ll need to not only master clinical skills but also embrace a challenging science that only recently began making its way into physician training. The imperative to deliver high-value care Physician training—as well as the practice of medicine—traditionally has focused on putting the best interest of the patient foremost by doing everything possible for each individual patient. But more recently, the medical profession has come to recognize that doing everything medically possible isn’t always in the patient’s best interest. At the same time, physicians have an ethical obligation to be prudent stewards of health care resources. That means that future physicians must learn how to deliver high-value care that achieves good patient outcomes at a reasonable cost—and simultaneously upholds the primacy of the patient-physician relationship. Think this sounds nuanced and challenging? That’s because it is. Even physicians like myself, who have been practicing and teaching for decades, can feel like we’re being pulled in so many directio...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news