Word: fineberg
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...recent article in Technology Review, Fineberg discusses one of the most important and difficult issues facing the medical profession and the public today: how to balance the possibilities new technologies present for saving lives with the need to contain costs and the realities of drastically limited resources...
...DEAN of the School of Public Health Harvey V. Fineberg '67 has been grappling with questions about medical ethics and decision-making throughout his versatile career. As a member last year of the state appointed Task Force on Liver Transplantation, Fineberg helped evaluate a proposal to create a pioneering consortium of four Boston area hospitals that could perform liver transplants. The author of several books, he has also written articles addressing such issues as rising costs of technology and the inadequacy of traditional ethical standards in evaluating such procedures as organ transplants...
Recently, Fineberg criticized the decision to perform the second-ever artificial heart implant, at Humana Hospital in Kentucky last month, because the procedure is still highly experimental and the hospital's resources could have been used for more established procedures such as valve replacements...
...hospitals for costly procedures is dealt with differently in many states, and while there are some national guidelines for such underwriters as Blue Cross-Blue Shield, there remains a gray area between "established," or reimbursable procedures, and those which are still "experimental" and therefore not funded by insurance. Fineberg has proposed that procedures such as heart and liver transplants, which today fall somewhere between the two traditional categories, be given a label of their own--he calls it "investigational." Whether or not and to what degree these oprations would be underwritten, and how they would receive priority in various scenarios...
...money gone?" asks one of Rushmer's colleagues, James Speer, a professor of biomedical history at Washington. "We are not living all that much longer. These expenditures can't be understood in the health of people, but in the creation of a very large industry." Harvey Fineberg, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, attributes fully one-third of the past decade's increase in Medicare costs to the increased use of high-tech medicine, particularly surgical and diagnostic procedures. "I don't mean to downplay the bravery of this individual," Fineberg says of last week's artificial-heart...