Category: Conference

Call for Proposals: ASLME Health Law Professors Conference

Nadia Sawicki Leave a comment

Loyola University Chicago School of Law and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics look forward to hosting the 42nd Annual Health Law Professors Conference on June 5-7, 2019 in Chicago.

We welcome your proposals for the conference program, which should be submitted via this form by January 15, 2019.

We are also pleased to introduce a new opportunity to publish your work in a special post-conference issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Further details are provided below the fold.

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2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics
June 1, 2018 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

“Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.” Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., School Bd. of Nassau, Fl. v. Arline, 480 U.S. 273 (1987).

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2018 annual conference, entitled: “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics.” This year’s conference is organized in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.

Conference Description

Historically and across societies people with disabilities have been stigmatized and excluded from social opportunities on a variety of culturally specific grounds. These justifications include assertions that people with disabilities are biologically defective, less than capable, costly, suffering, or fundamentally inappropriate for social inclusion. Rethinking the idea of disability so as to detach being disabled from inescapable disadvantage has been considered a key to twenty-first century reconstruction of how disablement is best understood.

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2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics
June 1, 2018 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

“Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.” Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., School Bd. of Nassau, Fl. v. Arline, 480 U.S. 273 (1987).

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2018 annual conference, entitled: “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics.” This year’s conference is organized in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.

Conference Description

Historically and across societies people with disabilities have been stigmatized and excluded from social opportunities on a variety of culturally specific grounds. These justifications include assertions that people with disabilities are biologically defective, less than capable, costly, suffering, or fundamentally inappropriate for social inclusion. Rethinking the idea of disability so as to detach being disabled from inescapable disadvantage has been considered a key to twenty-first century reconstruction of how disablement is best understood.

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REGISTER NOW! Ordeals in Health Care: Ethics and Efficient Delivery

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Ordeals in Health Care: Ethics and Efficient Delivery
May 10-11, 2018 1:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 

Economic ordeals are interventions that deliberately make access to products or services more difficult in an effort to improve resource allocation. In this vein, making patients wait in long lines to schedule an appointment with a specialist might discourage patients with needs that could be met by less qualified personnel from taking up the specialist’s time, thus freeing up time for those with complex needs. Similarly, putting brand-name medications at the bottom of a long list of options on clinicians’ computers might encourage them to prescribe a generic brand listed closer to the top.

Recent research in development economics, behavioral economics, and health policy suggests that some economic ordeals could help target health resources to patients who are more likely to utilize these resources, without the regressive effects of co-pays and other forms of financial participation on the part of patients. However, making health care deliberately less accessible raises ethical challenges. Is it not the case that ordeals discourage utilization by patients with acute needs? Do these ordeals affect some disadvantaged populations disproportionately? And do deliberate obstacles to health resource utilization violate the human right to health?

This workshop will bring together leading scholars in economics, ethics, health policy, public health, medicine, sociology, and law to explore these questions.

This event is organized by Nir Eyal, PhD, Associate Professor of Global Health and Population, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Anders Herlitz, PhD, Visiting Scientist, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Researcher, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register now!

Co-sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University; the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, with support from the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

Register for and learn more about the event here!

2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

2018 Petrie-Flom Center Annual Conference: Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics
June 1, 2018 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

“Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.” Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., School Bd. of Nassau, Fl. v. Arline, 480 U.S. 273 (1987).

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce plans for our 2018 annual conference, entitled: “Beyond Disadvantage: Disability, Law, and Bioethics.” This year’s conference is organized in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.

Conference Description

Historically and across societies people with disabilities have been stigmatized and excluded from social opportunities on a variety of culturally specific grounds. These justifications include assertions that people with disabilities are biologically defective, less than capable, costly, suffering, or fundamentally inappropriate for social inclusion. Rethinking the idea of disability so as to detach being disabled from inescapable disadvantage has been considered a key to twenty-first century reconstruction of how disablement is best understood.

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Call for Proposals: Symposium – Serving the Needs of Medicaid Populations

Nadia Sawicki Leave a comment

The Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and Annals of Health Law invite original research paper submissions for presentation at our Twelfth Annual Health Law Symposium: Serving the Needs of Medicaid Populations. The Symposium will take place at Loyola University Chicago School of Law on Friday, November 16, 2018.

The Symposium will explore whether the current Medicaid system is adequately serving the needs of its target population, and how social determinants of health affect access to care in the context of Medicaid. The Symposium is intended to touch upon a wide variety of areas responsive to this overall theme.  Accordingly, we invite submissions addressing any and all aspects of Medicaid and/or its impact upon accessible, quality patient care. Possible approaches to this Call for Proposals include, but are not limited to:

  • Medicaid’s impact on the financial viability of hospital systems and physician practices and the effect this has on access to health care. Topics may explore the financial burdens and/or benefits faced by health systems after Medicaid expansion, economic viability of health systems in states that did not expand Medicaid, and corporate restructuring in the wake of Medicaid reform.
  • The current status of Medicaid in relation to access to health care. Topics may include the health access trends within states that expanded or shrunk Medicaid, state use of Medicaid waivers, Medicaid work requirements, and shifts in DHHS practices and policies.
  • Populations underserved by Medicaid. Topics may explore immigrant access to care in Medicaid, access problems surrounding individuals with medical complexities, and children with disabilities in Medicaid.
  • Proposals to reform Medicaid in order to increase access and reduce social disparities. Topics may include new proposed models that increase access to care, the ACA’s role in expanding access under Medicaid, and bridging the disconnect between health care spending and health outcomes in the United States through Medicaid reform.

Submission Information: Those interested in participating, please send a 1000-word abstract to health-law@luc.edu by June 16, 2018.  Authors will be notified of decisions no later than July 14, 2018. It is our hope presenters will submit papers for publication in the Annals of Health Law. Papers submitted for publication will be due by January 8, 2019.

NEW REPORT: Ethical Issues Related to the Creation of Synthetic Human Embryos

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Report Summary Authored by Robert D. Truog, MD (Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School) and Melissa J. Lopes, JD (Harvard University Office of the Vice Provost for Research)

The Harvard Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight (the “ESCRO”) Committee, an ethics oversight committee charged with reviewing research protocols involving human embryos, human embryonic stem cells, and certain activities with non-embryonic human pluripotent stem cells, recently issued a report exploring the ethical issues related to the creation of synthetic human embryos.

Ethical committees such as the Harvard ESCRO occasionally receive inquiries to deliberate upon the ethical implications of emerging research technologies where there is no existing or established guidance to rely upon. Deliberating in these gray areas is not a simple task, but the Harvard ESCRO has developed a general framework for navigating this ethical terrain in real time. In these instances, the Harvard ESCRO generally consults with its peer oversight bodies, reviews data from the scientific and bioethical literature and from other scientists and ethicists in the field and, from time to time, convenes symposia to broaden the discussion around such emerging technologies.  Read More

Redefining Death in the Law

Gali Katznelson Leave a comment

By: Gali Katznelson

Jahi McMath was issued a death certificate four years ago in California. Today, at the age of 16, she remains connected to a ventilator in an apartment in New Jersey. Jahi was declared brain dead by her clinicians at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital following a cardiac arrest after a tonsillectomy. A legal battle between Jahi’s mother and the hospital ensued, with the mother requesting that Jahi remain on life support. The hospital refused, and after the hospital released Jahi to a coroner who issued her death certificate, Jahi’s family transported her to a paediatric ICU in a New Jersey hospital. New Jersey is the only state with a law requiring hospitals to accommodate patients whose families do not accept a determination of brain death on religious grounds.

Religious objections to brain death come from some members of the Orthodox Jewish, Japanese Shinto, Native American and Muslim communities. New York, California and Illinois also mandate accommodations for religious objections to brain death but these states leave the nature of the accommodation to the discretion of individual hospitals. This is unlike New Jersey, which allows an exception to brain death criteria and imposes a duty to accommodate patients who reject brain death state-wide. Should all states enact some form of a religious accommodation to brain death? To consider the same person to be alive in one part of the country but dead in another seems illogical. But rather than adapting current laws to accommodate objections based on religion, a more coherent approach might be to redefine the nature of the law itself.

As it stands in the US, the determination of brain death by neurological criteria is equated to a legal definition of death. This history dates back fifty years, to a report by the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death that defined irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. Neurologic criteria for death eventually made its way into law through the 1981 Uniform Declaration of Death Act (UDDA). This model statute states that death could be determined for an individual who has sustained either irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, made in accordance with acceptable medical standards. Every state has adopted some version of this statute.

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The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness
April 18, 2018 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East AB (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Decision aids can be highly-effective tools to promote shared decision making and support patients in becoming engaged participants in their healthcare.  Join us for the first-ever convening with leaders behind a Washington experiment in certifying decision aids, as state officials, health systems, and on-the-ground implementation experts share lessons learned and discuss policy recommendations for national or statewide approaches to decision aid certification.  

Program Overview

Person-centered care presents a unique opportunity to achieve the Quadruple Aim, especially during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. Building on the work of NQF and others, it is now clear that healthcare purchasers (states, plans, care providers) committed to person-centered care should also be committed to shared decision-making.

A number of policy initiatives have sought to increase the use of decision aids as an effective way to further shared decision making and person-centered care. Washington is the first – and so far only – state to recognize and act on this opportunity by establishing a process to certify decision aids across the health continuum, including during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. The program will examine the Washington experience and also explore policy barriers for replication of the Washington model at the state and national levels.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register now!

This event is part of the Project for Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a non-partisan, non-profit alliance of over 130 national organizations dedicated to being a catalyst to change the health delivery system, empower consumers, enhance provider capacity and improve public and private policies in advanced illness care.

Learn more about the event here!

The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Development and Certification of Decision Aids: Promoting Shared Decision-Making for Patients with Serious Illness
April 18, 2018 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East AB (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

Decision aids can be highly-effective tools to promote shared decision making and support patients in becoming engaged participants in their healthcare.  Join us for the first-ever convening with leaders behind a Washington experiment in certifying decision aids, as state officials, health systems, and on-the-ground implementation experts share lessons learned and discuss policy recommendations for national or statewide approaches to decision aid certification.  

Program Overview

Person-centered care presents a unique opportunity to achieve the Quadruple Aim, especially during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. Building on the work of NQF and others, it is now clear that healthcare purchasers (states, plans, care providers) committed to person-centered care should also be committed to shared decision-making.

A number of policy initiatives have sought to increase the use of decision aids as an effective way to further shared decision making and person-centered care. Washington is the first – and so far only – state to recognize and act on this opportunity by establishing a process to certify decision aids across the health continuum, including during serious illness when people are the most vulnerable. The program will examine the Washington experience and also explore policy barriers for replication of the Washington model at the state and national levels.

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and registration is required. Register now!

This event is part of the Project for Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a non-partisan, non-profit alliance of over 130 national organizations dedicated to being a catalyst to change the health delivery system, empower consumers, enhance provider capacity and improve public and private policies in advanced illness care.

Learn more about the event here!