Medicine as a corporate enterprise: a welcome step?
The medical profession is set for a change. It is being redesigned as a corporate enterprise. The health-care industry has proved to be lucrative and therefore has seen the entry of newer players from the corporate field into the market. The "Medical-Industrial complex" has led to the commercialization of health care well beyond what traditional practitioners would consider ideal. Medicine is being treated as a business, with cost curtailment measures and profit margins often dictating physicians' choices. A number of factors decide working environment in a corporate setup, all of which may affect the sacrosanct physician-doctor relationship and "physician" ethics. On the other side, the ability of the corporate sector to bring about a welcome change in the health-care sector in terms of availability of newer modalities of management, implementation of preventive and personalized health-care programme and, at the same time, adding to the comfort of the treating physician cannot be ignored.
Lecturer, Department of Orthopedics, Seth G.S. Medical College and The KEM Group of Hospitals, Mumbai, Editor, IJCP's Asian Journal of Orthopedics and Rheumatology.
Murali
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Poduval
Jayita
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Poduval