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

🤖 Plain-English Summary

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.

🔑 Key Findings

• 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?
• 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.
• 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.

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