The passivists: Managing risk through institutionalized ignorance in genomic medicine.

As the era of big data transforms modern medicine, clinicians have access to more health data than ever. Debates about how and when to institutionalize ignorance of health data are not unique to clinical genomics, but have spread throughout many fields of medicine.

⚡ This is an original paraphrased summary — not copied from the abstract. Full paper available at the source link below.

• 1 How do medical providers determine which data are relevant to patient care, which are irrelevant, and which may be inappropriately used to justify potentially harmful interventions?
• 2 One of the most prominent medical fields to address these questions head on - clinical genomics - is actively debating how to assess the value of genomic data.
• 3 In-depth interviews with clinicians and a content analysis of policy documents demonstrate that while many clinicians believe that collecting as much patient data as possible will lead to better patient care, a sizeable minority of clinicians preferred to collect less data.

Understanding this could lead to better treatments, improved diagnostics, or a deeper grasp of how the human body works — benefiting patient care globally.

This summary is based on publicly available metadata and abstract. For the full research paper, visit the original source: