Medical institutions didn’t always understand the importance of ethics to physician training, notes Timothy Lahey, MD, MMSc, chair of the clinical ethics committee at Lebanon, NH-based Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and associate professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

Almost all major healthcare systems are adopting some form of telehealth, and it is rapidly becoming a standard of care, says David A. Fleming, MD, MA, MACP, director of University of Missouri’s Center for Health Ethics in Columbia.

While ethics consults typically focus on individual patients’ unique situations, many involve scenarios that recur repeatedly. These are ideally addressed at an organizationwide level, according to Edward J. Dunn, MD, ScD, a fellow in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Wright State University in Dayton, OH. Dunn is a former director of the Integrated Ethics Program at Lexington (KY) VA Medical Center.