Privacy and confidentiality of emergency department patient information: Contemporary considerations and challenges.

This article provides a brief review of moral and legal duties to respect confidentiality in emergency medicine. The article considers current challenges to confidentiality in emergency departments and proposes strategies to address them. It is offered as an update of the two-part review of confidentiality in emergency medicine in 2005 by Moskop et al published in 2005 in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

PHYSICIANS' MORAL DUTIES DURING PANDEMICS.

BACKGROUND: Pandemics with devastating morbidity and mortality have occurred repeatedly throughout recorded history. Each new scourge seems to surprise governments, medical experts, and the public. The SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, for example, arrived as an unwelcome surprise to an unprepared world. DISCUSSION: Despite humanity's extensive experience with pandemics and their associated ethical dilemmas, no consensus has emerged on preferred normative standards to deal with them. In this article, we consider the ethical dilemmas faced by physicians who work in these risk-prone situations and propose a set of ethical norms for current and future pandemics. As front-line clinicians for critically ill patients during pandemics, emergency physicians will play a substantial role in making and implementing treatment allocation decisions. CONCLUSION: Our proposed ethical norms should help future physicians make morally challenging choices during pandemics.

Civility in Health Care: A Moral Imperative.

Civility is an essential feature of health care, as it is in so many other areas of human interaction. The article examines the meaning of civility, reviews its origins, and provides reasons for its moral significance in health care. It describes common types of uncivil behavior by health care professionals, patients, and visitors in hospitals and other health care settings, and it suggests strategies to prevent and respond to uncivil behavior, including institutional codes of conduct and disciplinary procedures. The article concludes that uncivil behavior toward health care professionals, patients, and others subverts the moral goals of health care and is therefore unacceptable. Civility is a basic professional duty that health care professionals should embrace, model, and teach.

Increasing Solid Organ Donation: A Role for Emergency Physicians.

BACKGROUND: More than 100,000 Americans with failing organs await transplantation, mostly from dead donors. Yet only a fraction of patients declared dead by neurological criteria (DNC) become organ donors. DISCUSSION: Emergency physicians (EPs) can improve solid organ donation in the following ways: providing perimortem critical care support to potential organ donors, promptly notifying organ procurement organizations (OPOs), asking neurocritical care specialists to evaluate selected emergency department patients for death based on established neurologic criteria, participating in research to advance these developments, implementing automatic OPO notification technologies, and educating the professional and lay communities about organ donation and transplantation, including exploration of opt-out (presumed consent) organ recovery policies. CONCLUSION: With future improvements in organ preservation and DNC assessment, EPs may become even more involved in the donation process. EPs should support and engage in efforts to promote organ donation and transplantation.

Artificial Intelligence in Emergency Medicine: Benefits, Risks, and Recommendations.

BACKGROUND: Artificial intelligence (AI) can be described as the use of computers to perform tasks that formerly required human cognition. The American Medical Association prefers the term 'augmented intelligence' over 'artificial intelligence' to emphasize the assistive role of computers in enhancing physician skills as opposed to replacing them. The integration of AI into emergency medicine, and clinical practice at large, has increased in recent years, and that trend is likely to continue. DISCUSSION: AI has demonstrated substantial potential benefit for physicians and patients. These benefits are transforming the therapeutic relationship from the traditional physician-patient dyad into a triadic doctor-patient-machine relationship. New AI technologies, however, require careful vetting, legal standards, patient safeguards, and provider education. Emergency physicians (EPs) should recognize the limits and risks of AI as well as its potential benefits. CONCLUSIONS: EPs must learn to partner with, not capitulate to, AI. AI has proven to be superior to, or on a par with, certain physician skills, such as interpreting radiographs and making diagnoses based on visual cues, such as skin cancer. AI can provide cognitive assistance, but EPs must interpret AI results within the clinical context of individual patients. They must also advocate for patient confidentiality, professional liability coverage, and the essential role of specialty-trained EPs.

Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking: Conceptual, Personal, and Policy Questions.

Although voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) as a way to hasten one's death is not yet a widely recognized practice in the United States, it has received increasing attention in the medical and bioethics literature in recent years. After a brief review of the broader context of human death and dying, this article poses and examines 11 conceptual, personal, and public policy questions about VSED. The article identifies essential features of VSED and discusses whether VSED is a type of suicide. It identifies reasons why people may or may not choose VSED, and it considers responses by family members and professional caregivers to people who have chosen VSED. It also considers how public policies may permit and regulate or restrict the practice of VSED. Examination of these questions is designed to increase understanding of VSED and to inform moral evaluation of this practice.

Ethical issues in the access to emergency care for undocumented immigrants.

Patients who are undocumented immigrants (UIs) frequently present to emergency departments in the United States, especially in communities with large immigrant populations. Emergency physicians confront important ethical issues when providing care for these patients. This article examines those ethical issues and recommends best practices in emergency care for UIs. After a brief introduction and description of the UI population, the article proposes central principles of emergency medical ethics as a framework for emergency physician decisions and actions. It then considers the role of law and public policy in health care for UIs, including the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and current practices of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The article concludes with discussion of the scope of emergency physician practice and with recommendations regarding best practices in ED care for UIs.

Ethical issues in access to and delivery of emergency department care in an era of changing reimbursement and novel payment models.

Hospital emergency departments (EDs) and the emergency physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who provide emergency care in them, are a critical component of the United States (US) health care system in the 21st century. Although access to emergency care has become a de facto right in the United States, funding for emergency care is fragmented and complex, which causes confusion and conflict about who should bear the cost of care. This article examines the tension between universal access to emergency care in the United States and the fragmentary, tenuous, and contentious financial arrangements that make it possible, viewing the issue in context of the historical development, legal and moral foundations, current situation, and future challenges of ED care in the United States. It begins with a review of the origins and evolution of emergency care and of hospital EDs in the United States. It then examines arguments for a right to emergency medical care and for shared obligations of patients to seek and of professionals and society to provide that care. Finally, it reviews current strategies and future prospects for protecting access to emergency care for patients who require it.

Compensation models in emergency medicine: An ethical perspective.

There is considerable diversity in compensation models in the specialty of Emergency Medicine (EM). We review different compensation models and examine moral consequences possibly associated with the use of various models. The article will consider how different models may promote or undermine health care's quadruple aim of providing quality care, improving population health, reducing health care costs, and improving the work-life balance of health care professionals. It will also assess how different models may promote or undermine the basic bioethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy, and justice.

Moral Conflicts and Religious Convictions: What Role for Clinical Ethics Consultants?

Moral conflicts over medical treatment that are the result of differences in fundamental moral commitments of the stakeholders, including religiously grounded commitments, can present difficult challenges for clinical ethics consultants. This article begins with a case example that poses such a conflict, then examines how consultants might use different approaches to clinical ethics consultation in an effort to facilitate the resolution of conflicts of this kind. Among the approaches considered are the authoritarian approach, the pure consensus approach, and the ethics facilitation approach described in the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation report of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, as well as a patient advocate approach, a clinician advocate approach, and an institutional advocate approach. The article identifies clear limitations to each of these approaches. An analysis of the introductory case illustrates those limitations, and the article concludes that deep-seated conflicts of this kind may reveal inescapable limits of current approaches to clinical ethics consultation.

Physician-assisted Death: Ethical Implications for Emergency Physicians.

Physician-assisted death (PAD) has long been a strongly debated moral and public policy issue in the United States, and an increasing number of jurisdictions have legalized this practice under certain circumstances. In light of changing terminology, laws, public and professional attitudes, and the availability of published data about the practice, we review key concepts and terms in the ongoing PAD debate, moral arguments for and against PAD, the current legal status of PAD in the United States and in other nations, and data on the reported experience with PAD in those U.S. jurisdictions where it is a legal practice. We then identify situations in which emergency physicians (EPs) may encounter patients who request PAD or have attempted to end their lives with physician assistance and consider EP responses in those situations. Based on our analysis, we offer recommendations for emergency medical practice and professional association policy.

Another Look at the Persistent Moral Problem of Emergency Department Crowding.

This article revisits the persistent problem of crowding in US hospital emergency departments (EDs). It begins with a brief review of origins of this problem, terms used to refer to ED crowding, proposed definitions and measures of crowding, and causal factors. The article then summarizes recent studies that document adverse moral consequences of ED crowding, including poorer patient outcomes; increased medical errors; compromises in patient physical privacy, confidentiality, and communication; and provider moral distress. It describes several organizational strategies implemented to relieve crowding and implications of ED crowding for individual practitioners. The article concludes that ED crowding remains a morally significant problem and calls on emergency physicians, ED and hospital leaders, emergency medicine professional associations, and policymakers to collaborate on solutions.

Doctor in, and for, the Family?: Physicians Reflect on Care for Loved Ones.

This commentary examines themes identified in twelve physicians' narratives recounting their experiences in caring for seriously ill family members. In these narratives, physicians describe heavy emotional burdens and other impediments to sound medical decision-making with and for their loved ones. The physicians struggled to balance their roles as physicians and as loving family members, and they employed their professional role in a variety of different ways. Several physicians became personal physicians to their family members, and others deliberately avoided that role. Serving as personal physician to a close family member is widely viewed as a violation of a professional boundary, and adopting that role may expose physicians to sanctions. These narratives offer lessons to physicians regarding their roles in caring for family members and in supporting family members of patients with grave illnesses.

Law Enforcement and Emergency Medicine: An Ethical Analysis.

Emergency physicians frequently interact with law enforcement officers and patients in their custody. As always, the emergency physician's primary professional responsibility is to promote patient welfare, and his or her first duty is to the patient. Emergency physicians should treat criminals, suspects, and prisoners with the same respect and attention they afford other patients while ensuring the safety of staff, visitors, and other patients. Respect for patient privacy and protection of confidentiality are of paramount importance to the patient-physician relationship. Simultaneously, emergency physicians should attempt to accommodate law enforcement personnel in a professional manner, enlisting their aid when necessary. Often this relates to the emergency physician's socially imposed duties, governed by state laws, to report infectious diseases, suspicion of abuse or neglect, and threats of harm. It is the emergency physician's duty to maintain patient confidentiality while complying with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations and state law.

Ethics of ambulance diversion.

Ambulance diversion is a common and controversial method used by emergency departments (EDs) to reduce stress on individual departments and providers and relieve mismatches in the supply and demand for ED beds. Under this strategy, ambulances bound for one hospital are redirected to another, usually under policies established by regional emergency medical services systems. Other responses to this mismatch include maladaptive behaviors (such as "boarding" in "hallway beds") and the development of terminology intended to normalize these practices, all of which are reviewed in this article. We examine the history and causes of diversion as well as the ethical foundations and practical consequences of it. We contend that (1) from a moral viewpoint, the most important stakeholder is the individual patient because diversion decisions are usually relative rather than absolute; (2) decisions regarding ambulance diversion should be made with careful consideration of individual patient preferences, local and state emergency medical services laws, and institutional surge capacity; and (3) authorities should consider the potential positive effects of a regional or statewide ban on diversion.