Medical Ethics in Osteopathic Medicine: Clinical and Professional Considerations - 1 AOA Category 1-A Credit

Course overview

This course reviews practical clinical ethics using the four pillars of bioethics and applies them to real-world decisions about consent, documentation integrity, and end-of-life care. It emphasizes patient-centered care and whole-person ethics, including a whole-person perspective in selected examples. Learners practice identifying ethical conflicts, selecting defensible actions, and documenting decisions clearly when facing complex scenarios, emerging technologies, and surrogate decision-making challenges. In daily practice, osteopathic physicians face recurring ethical uncertainty and variable documentation quality. Newer documentation tools may introduce risks to accuracy, bias, privacy, and accountability if safeguards are unclear or inconsistently applied. This activity addresses these gaps by providing a structured ethics framework and case-based application for documentation and end-of-life decisions.