Research
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Private Equity Acquisition of Physician Practices—Looking for Ethical Guidance From Professional Societies
In 2012, private equity firms purchased approximately 75 physician-owned practices; by 2021, that number had risen to almost 500. However, private equity acquisitions can also lead to ethically troubling consequences. For example, to maximize the return on their investments, private equity firms sometimes pressure clinicians to see more patients, perform more procedures on those patients,…
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Classification of Patients’ Judgments of Their Physicians in Web-Based Written Reviews Using Natural Language Processing
Patients increasingly rely on web-based physician reviews to choose a physician and share their experiences. However, the unstructured text of these written reviews presents a challenge for researchers seeking to make inferences about patients’ judgments. This study aims to train, test, and validate an advanced natural language processing algorithm for classifying the presence and valence of…
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Helping Patients Decide: Ten Steps to Better Risk Communication
With increasing frequency, patients are being asked to make complex decisions about cancer screening, prevention, and treatment. These decisions are fraught with emotion and cognitive difficulty simultaneously. In this commentary, we highlight 10 methods that have been empirically shown to improve patients’ understanding of risk and benefit information and/or their decision making. The methods range from…
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Professional Experiences and Career Trajectories of Mid- to Senior-Career Women Clinician-Scientists
How have women mid- to senior-career clinician-scientists experienced gender throughout their careers? In this qualitative interview study among 31 women clinician-scientists, participants experienced the institution of academic medicine as a male-centric system misaligned with the needs of women and people with family caregiving responsibilities. They felt that women’s needs were underrecognized and unaccommodated even in…
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The shifting perspectives study protocol: Cognitive remediation therapy as an adjunctive treatment to family based treatment for adolescents with anorexia nervosa
Adolescents with anorexia nervosa have set-shifting inefficiencies that can be exacerbated by starvation and that may interfere with outcomes of treatment interventions. Cognitive Remediation Therapy (CRT), an adjunctive treatment focused on improving set-shifting, can target inefficiencies and may augment treatment effectiveness. The best way to add CRT to the standard of care (Family Based Treatment,…
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Randomized trial of community health worker-led decision coaching to promote shared decision-making for prostate cancer screening among Black male patients and their providers
Black men are disproportionately affected by prostate cancer, the most common non-cutaneous malignancy among men in the USA. The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) encourages prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing decisions to be based on shared decision-making (SDM) clinician professional judgment, and patient preferences. However, evidence suggests that SDM is underutilized in clinical practice,…
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Paying the Right Amount to Challenge Trial Participants – We Need to Use Behavioral Science Insights to Sell What’s Right
Sometimes doing what’s right depends on anticipating how people will react when you do the right thing. Consider two aspects of challenge trial payments discussed by Lynch and colleagues (2021). The first is the importance of promoting public trust in challenge trial payments. Lynch and colleagues point out that even if there is not any…
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Two Minds, One Patient: Clearing up Confusion About “Ambivalence”
Patients who experience difficulty making medical decisions are often referred to as “ambivalent.” However, the current lack of attention to the nuances between a cluster of phenomena that resemble ambivalence means that we are not always recognizing what is really going on with a patient. Importantly, different kinds of “ambivalence” may call for different approaches.…
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Vaccinating Health Care Employees — Do They All Deserve Early Access?
In vaccinating low-risk employees, the leaders of healthcare organizations violated their duty to promote public health. Furthermore, they contributed to an unfortunate narrative: that powerful people in health care are willing to serve their own interests ahead of society’s.
