The industrialization of healthcare — where patients are “consumers” and physicians are “providers” — may have detrimental effects on physicians’ clinical judgment and dissuade high-caliber people from entering the field, according to two physicians from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman, MD, co-authored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine analyzing how the emphasis on economics can hurt healthcare.
“Reducing medicine to economics makes a mockery of the bond between the healer and the sick,” they wrote, according to a news release on the report. They also say evidence-based medicine is nothing new, but while in the past the focus was on physicians’ ability to make a clinical judgment, now prominent health policy officials contend that “clinical care should essentially be a matter of following operating manuals containing preset guidelines, like factory blueprints, written by experts.”
The physicians have recommended other healthcare professionals abandon the use of “customers,” “consumers” and “providers” because it diminishes the individuality of medicine. They also note that reconfiguring the field in economic terms is “unlikely to attract creative and independent thinkers with not only expertise in science and biology but also an authentic focus on humanism and caring,” according to the release.
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