General hospital psychiatry and the ethics of managed care

Managed care programs come in many stripes, and the field is evolving with bewildering rapidity. In order to be effective advocates and critics, clinicians need a vision of ethical managed care practice, to use as a standard for judgment and quality improvement. This paper presents four principles that I believe capture the essential stance of an ethical clinician in managed care. The central challenge for creating ethical managed care systems is integrating stewardship (communitarian) and fiduciary (patient centered) values. Because general hospital psychiatrists treat individual patients in a "communal" (institutional) setting in which issues of resource use stand out with great clarity, they will play a central role in developing ethical guidelines for managed care practice. This paper considers issues in general hospital psychiatric practice--determining hospital length of stay, deciding how much suicidal risk is tolerable in a treatment plan, and the problems that arise when patients prefer valid but less cost-effective treatments--as examples of the kinds of questions a clinically relevant set of ethics must address.