Ethics of Screening Using Predictive Risk Models
As Rose noted, the individual approach to health improvement is hampered by the “difficulties and costs of screening. A screening test seeks to identify people who are at sufficiently high risk of an adverse outcome to warrant offering them a diagnostic test or recommending a prophylactic treatment. The stratified approach to the Triple Aim likewise requires screening a population to identify subpopulations that are at sufficiently high risk of a Triple Fail event and sufficiently amenable to a preventive intervention to justify further action.
Any screening test has the potential to cause more harm than good, such as by exposing patients to false positive and false negative results. Therefore, strict ethical guidelines are required to safeguard against the inappropriate use of screening. The World Health Organization published ten prerequisites, proposed by Wilson and Jungner that should be met by any ethical screening program. Among these prerequisites are that the condition being screened for should be an important health problem; that there should be a detectable early stage when treatment would be of more benefit than it would be later; and that the risks, both physical and psychological, should be less than the benefits.
Because the stratified approach to the Triple Aim involves population screening using routine data, we suggest that equivalent caveats should apply as part of the planning phase. Adapting Wilson and Jungner’s prerequisites, we propose the following ethical criteria for stratifying populations according to risk for Triple Fail events.