Faculty Bibliography

The phenomenon of leaving the hospital against medical advice (AMA) despite being quite common and associated with significant deleterious health outcomes remains inadequately understood and addressed. Researchers have identified certain patient characteristics as predictors of AMA discharges, but the patients' reasons for these events have not been comprehensively explored. Moreover, because the medical authority model dominates this research area, providers' experiences of AMA discharges remain unstudied. We examined the AMA discharge from a patient-centered perspective by analyzing the content of notes providers generate to record such events. We analyzed providers' notes for all inpatients with a primary HIV diagnosis (N = 33) that, in 2012, left an urban hospital AMA. Applying the Scott and Lyman accounts framework, we identified that the notes constituted records of providers' and patients' excuses and justifications for failing to meet the expectations of a provider offering patient-centered care and a compliant patient receiving care. Alongside the patients' reasons for leaving AMA, the notes also revealed the providers' reasons for honoring or discrediting the patients' accounts. The style of the accounts and the professional status of the notes' authors enabled us to contextualize the production and sharing of AMA notes in the hospital hierarchy. Conceptualizing AMA notes as dyadic accounts elicited specific factors that challenge the patient-provider relationship, and generated insights on how to strengthen it, and thus decrease the rates of AMA discharges and their associated health effects.

The care of "Very Important Patients" is different from other patients because they may receive greater access, attention, and resources from health care staff. Although the term "Very Important Patient" is used regularly in the medical literature and is implicitly understood, in practice it constitutes a wide and heterogeneous group of patients that have a strong effect on health care providers. We define a "Very Important Patient" as a very influential patient whose individual attributes and characteristics (i.e., social status, occupation, position, etc.) coupled with their behavior, have the potential to significantly influence a clinician's judgment or behavior. Physicians, celebrities, the politically powerful, and philanthropists, may all become "Very Important Patients" in the appropriate context. The quality of care may be inferior because health care professionals may deviate from standard practices when caring for them. Understanding the common features among what may otherwise be very different groups of patients can help health care providers manage ethical concerns when they arise. We use a series of vignettes to demonstrate how "Very Important Patient's'" behavior and status can influence a clinician's judgment or actions. Appreciating the ethical principles in these varied circumstances provides health care professionals with the tools to manage ethical conflicts that arise in the care of "Very Important Patients". We conclude each vignette with guidance for how health care providers and administrators can manage the ethical concern.

Patients rely on, benefit from, and are strongly influenced by physicians' recommendations. In spite of the centrality and importance of physicians' recommendations to clinical care, there is only a scant literature describing the conceptual process of forming a clinical recommendation, and no discrete professional standards for making individual clinical recommendations. Evidence-based medicine and shared decision making together are intended to improve medical decision making, but there has been limited attention to how a recommendation is discretely formulated from either of those processes or how patients' preferences ought to be considered and how much weight they should hold. Moreover, physicians' bias has been reported to strongly influence how a recommendation is derived, thereby undermining the quality of healthcare decisions and patients' trust. To demonstrate a potential for improving the quality of decisions, this article proposes a conceptual framework for how physicians should reach a clinical recommendation and apply the process in practice. For preference-sensitive clinical decisions-that is, clinical decisions when patients' values and preferences are relevant-the process for reaching a recommendation should be transparent to patients and should be based solely on the medical evidence and patients' values and preferences. When patients' preferences for care do not prioritize health, physicians decide whether their recommendation will prioritize a welfare-enhancing versus an autonomy-enhancing approach. When there are gaps in understanding how physicians derive their clinical recommendations and how to further improve the quality of the decisions, the author calls for further empiric research.