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The patient-safety movement has turned clinical medicine into a team sport, but administrators have been left off the team. The effects on patients of administrative decisions and changes therefore remain obscure, unexamined, and unimprovable.

In the face of a rapidly changing technology landscape, the National Academy of Medicine has formed the Committee on Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation in health and medicine to convene diverse stakeholders to reenvision governance in health and medicine and drive collective action.

Drawing on peer review and professionalism, some quality-improvement efforts tap into physicians’ intrinsic motivations for giving their patients the best possible care. How can we scale up such promising approaches and create and sustain a spirit of inquiry?

Proliferating measures of health care quality may distract clinicians from what matters to individual patients and from larger public health problems. Has the quality-improvement movement gone astray by ignoring the complexity of both high-quality care and physicians’ motivations?

Decades into the quality improvement movement in U.S. health care, the fix for the system has become a massive, cumbersome, time-consuming, demoralizing system in its own right — and we don’t even know whether it is improving care.

“Physicianhood” has long been conceived as masculine, an implicit characterization that affects the quality and nature of health care. A deeper understanding of gender issues in medicine may help us improve both the experiences of nonmale physicians and patient care.

Photographer Graciela Iturbide captures death and suffering, using her camera to protect herself emotionally from the painful events she witnesses. What can a young surgeon learn from her about aesthetic distance and empathy in medicine?

The emerging specialty of consultative medicine is rooted in generalism and aims to integrate the best of the Oslerian diagnostic tradition with the multidisciplinary collaboration and modern technologies needed to tackle uncertain, difficult, or complex diagnoses.

Over time, myriad developments in health care have multiplied the places and people available to provide care to patients. Viewed through the lens of classic economics, this fragmentation can be seen as a division of labor — which has both benefits and drawbacks.

Building integrated translational pipelines that use data rapidly and effectively to address health effects of natural disasters will require substantial investment, which must rely on evidence of which approaches improve outcomes. But promising solutions are available.

Questions about excluding transgender people from antidiscrimination protections reflect the polarizing nature of definitions of sex. Yet historians of medicine know that the relevant moral and scientific questions touch on age-old themes in medical understanding.