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Marketing the Research Missions of Academic Medical Centers: Why Messages Blurring Lines Between Clinical Care and Research Are Bad for both Business and Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

MARK YARBOROUGH ,
TIMOTHY HOUK ,
SARAH TINKER PERRAULT ,
YAEL SCHENKER  and
RICHARD R. SHARP
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Abstract:

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.

Keywords

Academic Medical Centersadvertising practicesmarketingscience communicationclinical researchtherapeutic misconceptioninformed consent
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 468 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Notes

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