A Hippocratic Oath for the Diagnostics Industry

Medical professions have extremely deep moral and ethical roots. Unfortunately, these principles sometimes get lost within today’s corporatized, depersonalized healthcare industry, and we are failing to consistently meet the clinical and economic needs of patients. This presentation will discuss the disconnect between medical professionals’ values and the behavior of corporations. It will use analogies of corporate social responsibility in other domains, such as fair labor and environmental responsibility, as well as examples specific to the clinical laboratory industry to demonstrate how we can improve patient care through reestablishing our collective ethical roots.

Lecture Presenter
Brian R. Jackson, MD, MS
Brian R. Jackson, MD, MS
Vice President, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, ARUP Laboratories
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah School of Medicine
Associate Professor of Pathology, University of Utah School of Medicine

As vice president and chief medical informatics officer, Dr. Jackson directs the Informatics Department at ARUP, including ARUP Consult®, decision support, product management, informatics software development, and ATOP® consulting. He is also the medical director for Referral Testing and an associate professor of pathology at the University of Utah. He received his BA in mathematics, his MS in medical informatics, and his MD from the University of Utah, and completed a clinical pathology residency at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Prior to his employment at ARUP, Dr. Jackson was a staff clinical pathologist and informaticist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, a product manager for a Belgium-based medical software firm, and a National Library of Medicine informatics fellow at the University of Utah. Dr. Jackson’s research interests include economic analysis of diagnostic testing and physician utilization of laboratory tests. He is certified in clinical pathology by the American Board of Pathology.

Objectives

After this presentation, participants will be able to:

Match the key principles of medical ethics with modern examples from laboratory medicine.
Identify mechanisms through which laboratories can raise the visibility of their values, both to internal and external stakeholders.
Identify mechanisms through which hospitals and healthcare systems can reward ethical behavior in their suppliers, including via reference laboratories.