TY - JOUR
T1 - Marketing the research missions of academic medical centers
T2 - Why messages blurring lines between clinical care and research are bad for both business and ethics
AU - Yarborough, Mark
AU - Houk, Timothy
AU - Perrault, Sarah Tinker
AU - Schenker, Yael
AU - Sharp, Richard R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2019.
PY - 2019/7/1
Y1 - 2019/7/1
N2 - Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices.
AB - Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices.
KW - Academic Medical Centers
KW - Advertising practices
KW - Clinical research
KW - Informed consent
KW - Marketing
KW - Science communication
KW - Therapeutic misconception
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85069054936&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85069054936&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0963180119000392
DO - 10.1017/S0963180119000392
M3 - Article
C2 - 31298193
AN - SCOPUS:85069054936
SN - 0963-1801
VL - 28
SP - 468
EP - 475
JO - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
JF - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
IS - 3
ER -