Klitgaard Moreno (junegrain64)
Diffusion of responsibility describes how individuals can underperform in circumstances of shared accountability. While not well studied in health care settings, this phenomenon is an unintended consequence of the health care sector's complexity and fragmentation. This article considers 3 ways in which monetary and nonmonetary incentives can mitigate negative consequences of diffusion of responsibility. First, incentives should be finite and focused. Second, health care organizations can incentivize both individual and team performance. Third, organizations can use peer comparison feedback to amplify effective incentivizing strategies.Nudges are subtle changes to the design of the environment or the framing of information that can influence our behaviors. There is significant potential to use nudges in health care to improve patient outcomes and transform health care delivery. However, these interventions must be tested and implemented using a systematic approach. In this article, we describe several ways to design nudges for success by focusing on optimizing and fitting them into the clinical workflow, engaging the right stakeholders, and rapid experimentation.Most women requesting pregnancy termination have already decided to undergo an abortion. Physicians are required to obtain informed consent after offering objective and accurate descriptions of abortion and its risks and benefits. Some jurisdictions also require concurrent counseling and ultrasound viewing. This article discusses potential benefits and harms of providing emotionally charged or biased content about abortions at the time of service, considers what constitutes ethical content, and explores when ethical content should be part of abortion decision making.Many health systems have adopted online patient portals that allow patients to easily view their health records. As a result, notes written by health care professionals are increasingly read by both clinicians and patients, and clinicians in specialties that routinely involve sensitive information (eg, mental health care) have had to construct notes in a manner that respectfully promotes therapeutic relationships with patients. This article discusses whether ethics consultation services should share notes with patients through online portals and ways to handle practical implementation challenges. In support of sharing notes, this article appeals to an existing right that patients have to access their health record and suggests that sharing ethics consultation notes might help patients understand key clinical ethics concepts and practices.Because human errors should be regarded as expected events, health care organizations should routinize processes aimed at human error prevention, limit negative consequences when human errors do occur, and support and educate those who have erred. A just culture perspective suggests that responding punitively to those who err should be reserved for those who have willfully and irremediably caused harm, because punishment creates blame-based workplace cultures that deter error reporting, which makes patients less safe.Like all humans, health professionals are subject to cognitive biases that can render diagnoses and treatment decisions vulnerable to error. Learning effective debiasing strategies and cultivating awareness of confirmation, anchoring, and outcomes biases and the affect heuristic, among others, and their effects on clinical decision making should be prioritized in all stages of education.A nudge is an intervention designed to prompt people to "voluntarily" make the choice intended by those who altered the choice environment or situation, and therefore using nudges is thought to undermine self-determination. selleck chemicals llc Evidence for this assumption is weak, however, and sets aside much of what we know about human conduct sociologically. This paper argues that the practical consciousness that people have about their own actions and reasons for executi