SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “FAIR principles”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

PubMedDate not supplied

Organizing for empowerment: an interview with AES's Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke. Interview by Suzy Wetlaufer.

The topic of empowerment is receiving a lot of attention, but how many employees are truly empowered? At the global electricity giant AES Corporation, the answer is all 40,000 of them. In this interview, chairman Roger Sant and CEO Dennis Bakke reflect on their trials and triumphs in creating an exceptional company and explain how their employee-run company works. When they founded AES in 1981, Sant and Bakke set out to create a company where people could have engaging experiences on a daily basis--a company that embodied the principles of fairness, integrity, social responsibility, and fun. Putting those principles into action has created something unique--an ecosystem of real empowerment. What does that system look like? Rather than having a traditional hierarchical chain of command, AES is organized around small teams that are responsible for operations and maintenance. Moreover, AES has eliminated functional departments; there's no corporate marketing division or human resources department. For the system to work, every person must become a well-rounded generalist--a mini-CEO. That, in turn, redefines the jobs of the people at headquarters. Instead of setting strategy and making the "the big decisions," Sant and Bakke act as advisers, guardians of the principles, accountability officers, and chief encouragers. Can other companies successfully adopt the mechanics of such a system? Not unless they first adopt the shared principles that have guided AES since its inception. "Empowerment without values isn't empowerment," says Sant. "It's just technique," adds Bakke.

Commerce↗

PubMed2005

HIV international clinical research: exploitation and risk.

This paper aims to show that to reduce the level of exploitation present in (some) international clinical trials, research sponsors must aim to provide both an ex-ante expected gain in utility and a fair ex-post distribution of benefits for research subjects. I suggest the following principles of fair risk distribution in international research as the basis of a normative definition of fairness: (a) Persons should not be forced (by circumstance) to gamble in order to achieve or protect basic goods; (b) In cases where one party is gambling with basic goods and the other party is not, the distribution of benefits and burdens must be arranged so that they are of greatest benefit to the worst off; (c) In relationships where one party is gambling for basic goods and the other party is not, the party gambling for basic goods must be assured of some guaranteed benefits in addition to the chance of getting some practical benefits. These principles are applied to the case of HIV international research. I conclude that the research (as described) is mutually advantageous but still exploitative because the distribution of surplus benefits is unfair. It is unfair because research subjects are gambling with and for basic goods but they are not assured of a fair ex-post distribution of benefits. Principles (b) and (c) are not satisfied. Research participants are not accorded enough guaranteed benefits to outweigh the risks they undertake.

Anti-Retroviral Agents↗

PubMed2000

Betrayal of confidence in the Court of Appeal.

In overturning Latham J's judgment in R v Department of Health, Ex Parte Source Informatics Ltd. that anonymisation does not obviate breaching a personal confidence, the Court of Appeal holds that where the duty of confidence arises in equity it does not prohibit the confidant using the confided information without the consent of the confider if this does not treat the confider unfairly (relative to the Court's view of the confider's legitimate interests). We argue that this principle--by bringing fairness to bear on the scope of the duty of confidence rather than on whether a breach of it may be lawful--has no authority in usable precedents; that the Court's interpretation of fairness in applying this principle is, in any event, incompatible with the Data Protection Act 1998 (in part because the Court has too narrow a conception of privacy); that the Court errs in holding that neither anonymisation of personal data nor use of anonymous data falls under the Data Protection Act; and that the Court's insensitivity to the vulnerability that leads patients to disclose information about themselves to health professionals for their treatment, leads it to misidentify the basis of the duty of confidence in such disclosures. The Court of Appeal's reasoning does not clarify the duty of confidence, but virtually abolishes it in the face of competing commercial and research interests.

Confidentiality↗

PubMed1998

Relationship between nerve and muscle fiber conduction velocities of the same motor unit in man.

To test the hypothesis that the nerve fiber conduction velocity of a motor unit is correlated with the muscle fiber conduction velocity of the unit, the collision technique was used to discriminate the motor unit action potentials elicited by stimulation of a group of nerve fibers with known conduction velocity. Muscle fiber conduction velocity was determined from the propagating action potentials of the unit recorded by a surface electrode array. A weak but significantly positive correlation was found between nerve and muscle fiber conduction velocities in the thenar muscle of human subjects. The results indicate that the size principle that governs the relation between nerve and muscle fiber size is a fairly weak principle with occasional exceptions.

Action Potentials↗

PubMed1993

Funding hospital-based emergency services.

In the final analysis, implementing the ED funding model will not generate additional dollars for hospitals; rather the funding model will function as a tool for reallocating existing health care dollars. This function is particularly important as government funding for health care is subjected to increasing financial restraint. As such, the ED funding model will serve to further the Acute Care Funding Plan principles of fairness and equity, a recognition of the unique funding requirements for ambulatory care, and the need to develop cost-effective service delivery. Adherence to these principles is integral to maintaining the affordable, publicly administered national health care system Canadians have come to expect and cherish.

Acute Disease↗

PubMed2002

[Ethical principles of clinical trials in minors].

Clinical trials in volunteers and patients are essential to ensure rational treatment of patients. As a rule, drugs are routinely developed for adults, but children are excluded. A major reason for this restriction are ethical justifications, in particular the lack of autonomy on the part of children. The principle of fairness, however, requires that everyone should benefit from progress. Industry, science and society are therefore called upon to find ways of making available safe and adequate treatment for children as quickly as possible, by defining the required conditions for pediatric clinical trials. Important principles are minimal risk, minimal invasivity, rapid decision-making, and careful documentation of trial results. Dynamic ethical principles, such as autonomy and competence in adolescents must be considered on equal footing with existing international GCP guidelines. Aspects of child psychology indicate that the autonomy of adolescents should be respected. Where economic incentives for such trials are absent, for example, in the case of non-pharmacological problems, pediatric trials must be considered a task for society as a whole.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease transmission by plasma products: assessing and communicating risk in an era of scientific uncertainty.

A substantial body of animal data indicates that transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are transmitted through blood. These data have been augmented in the past year by reports that two recipients of red cells from donors with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the United Kingdom have acquired this infection. Most of the blood donations collected in countries affected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and vCJD also contribute plasma to fractionation pools. Thus, a number of batches of fractionated products have included plasma from donors who developed vCJD. On the basis of public health strategies influenced, in part, by risk assessments, the UK and the French authorities have instituted measures for recalling products and informing patients of the estimated risks. It is therefore relevant to review the principles used by authorities in generating risk assessments for the transmission of TSEs by blood and blood products. While the general principles are fairly straightforward, the final assessments are very dependent on the magnitude of several key parameters, which are, largely, still unknown. A critical determinant of final product risk is the extent to which the plasma fractionation process will contribute to eliminating the infectious prion agent. Therefore, regulatory and industry measures to characterize fractionation processes for their capacity to eliminate prions are to be strongly encouraged. In the interim, an understanding of the principles used to generate risk assessments should contribute to an enhanced ability to address this threat to patient safety. Authorities should recognize that adequate communication is an integral part of good risk-management practices.

Animals↗

PubMed1999

Inequalities in health and intergenerational equity.

In the popular folklore three-score-years-and-ten is treated as a fair innings for people, and thereby serves as an informal reference point for judgements about distributive justice within a community. But length of life alone is an insufficient basis for such judgements--a person's health-related quality-of-life also needs to be taken into account. If one of the objectives of public policy is to reduce inequalities in lifetime health, it will be demonstrated that this is very likely to require systematic discrimination against the older members of a community. The notion of community solidarity will also be tested, because a decision will need to be made as to whether the same fair innings applies to all members of the community, or whether some are entitled to more than others. The strength of the fair innings principle is that it brings these issues to the fore in a systematic way which should aid their resolution in a practical context.

Age Factors↗

PubMed2002

The rationale of value-laden medicine.

Medicine is becoming increasingly confident that scientific advances, especially in the area of genetics, will allow a major improvement in the control and eradication of disease. This development seems to go hand in hand with health-enhancement strategies, erasing the distinction between the states of health and disease, and blurring the specific goals of medical services. Medicine tends to become an increasingly technocentric practice that relies heavily on expert knowledge and on epidemiological evidence, neglecting the lived-body experience of being ill, and tending to transform costly medical services into commodities only affordable by the affluent. This paper argues that disease is not merely a functional description, but rather a definitely value-laden organismic state that is experienced by the patient, needs to be explored and treated by medical practitioners, and requires the assessment and participation of social institutions concerned with the delivery and support of medical services. Each of these perspectives introduces its own set of values, both in the clinical encounter and in public health programmes. Bioethics seems to be the appropriate discipline to discuss all these values involved, and help assign them properly in order to rescue the caring concern of medicine for the sick, as well as uphold a principle of fairness in publicly funded medical services.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2026

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API.

BACKGROUND: The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. FINDINGS: To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. All available ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases, from MSL1 to MSL41, were transformed into a unified, semantically structured ontology comprising more than 195,000 current and historical entities and deployed through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The ontology is automatically rebuilt and republished whenever a new MSL release becomes available. Complementary ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries support integration into downstream systems. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these resources enable, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical ICTV taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints, including resolution of former taxonomic terms to their current accepted taxon or taxa and retrieval of taxon histories across releases. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

API↗

PubMed2005

Gamete donation in a system of need-adjusted reciprocity.

A new paradigm to collect and allocate donor gametes is proposed. In the system, called indirect mirror exchange, the partner of the person who needs donor gametes, donates in exchange for bonus points that are awarded to the infertile person. All candidate recipients of donor gametes are ranked on a waiting list and receive points according to waiting time, medical urgency, phenotypic resemblance and contribution. According to the principle of fairness, persons who benefit from a system are obliged to contribute their share. However, strict reciprocity is rejected as unfair. A contribution by the couple is thus not a necessary condition for access to the waiting list. The system of reciprocity is adjusted by taking account of need considerations. The number of bonus points awarded to contributors should be high enough to move them to the front section of the waiting list.

Female↗

PubMed2003

Three-dimensional edge-preserving image enhancement for computed tomography.

Computed tomography (CT) images exhibit a variable amount of noise and blur, depending on the physical characteristics of the apparatus and the selected reconstruction method. Standard algorithms tend to favor reconstruction speed over resolution, thereby jeopardizing applications where accuracy is critical. In this paper, we propose to enhance CT images by applying half-quadratic edge-preserving image restoration (or deconvolution) to them. This approach may be used with virtually any CT scanner, provided the overall point-spread function can be roughly estimated. In image restoration, Markov random fields (MRFs) have proven to be very flexible a priori models and to yield impressive results with edge-preserving penalization, but their implementation in clinical routine is limited because they are often viewed as complex and time consuming. For these practical reasons, we focused on numerical efficiency and developed a fast implementation based on a simple three-dimensional MRF model with convex edge-preserving potentials. The resulting restoration method provides good recovery of sharp discontinuities while using convex duality principles yields fairly simple implementation of the optimization. Further reduction of the computational load can be achieved if the point-spread function is assumed to be separable. Synthetic and real data experiments indicate that the method provides significant improvements over standard reconstruction techniques and compares well with convex-potential Markov-based reconstruction, while being more flexible and numerically efficient.

Algorithms↗

PubMed1995

Policy goals for health and safety.

Health management and safety regulation are separate disciplines but share the aim to extend expectancy of life in good health. The need to improve cost-effectiveness calls for their co-ordinated management according to a unified rationale. Three guiding principles of accountability, demonstrable net benefit and a uniform measure of performance, have been laid out in Canada by the Joint Committee on Health and Safety. They call for open accounting in terms of (health-related quality-adjusted) life expectancy. The principles are utilitarian in format but, it is argued, inequity is naturally diminished in the process of optimizing cost-effectiveness through maximum marginal returns. Comments are made on practical implementation. The need for public consent in practice calls for two additional principles reflecting fair procedure and sovereignty of the citizens. It is concluded that public health and safety measures should be surveyed, documented for cost-effectiveness and prioritized for improvement.

Canada↗

PubMed2003

Anabolic steroids in sport: biochemical, clinical and analytical perspectives.

International Olympic Committee accredited laboratories play a key role in upholding the principle of fair play and innate ability, as desired by the majority of sports competitors and spectators. Not only does doping damage the image of sport, but it can also be harmful to the individual. The great majority of samples test negative but, when an adverse finding is declared, the analytical data must be of a sufficiently high standard to withstand legal challenges by third parties. The most widely misused performance-enhancing drugs are the anabolic-androgenic steroids, commonly referred to as 'anabolic steroids'. This review attempts to address the complex issues concerning anabolic steroids in sport by considering the clinical, biochemical and analytical perspectives.

Anabolic Agents↗

PubMed2025

Fundamentals of FAIR biomedical data analyses in the cloud using custom pipelines.

As the biomedical data ecosystem increasingly embraces the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data principles to publish multimodal datasets to the cloud, opportunities for cloud-based research continue to expand. Besides the potential for accelerated and diverse biomedical discovery that comes from a harmonized data ecosystem, the cloud also presents a shift away from the standard practice of duplicating data to computational clusters or local computers for analysis. However, despite these benefits, researcher migration to the cloud has lagged, in part due to insufficient educational resources to train biomedical scientists on cloud infrastructure. There exists a conceptual lack especially around the crafting of custom analytic pipelines that require software not pre-installed by cloud analysis platforms. We here present three fundamental concepts necessary for custom pipeline creation in the cloud. These overarching concepts are workflow and cloud provider agnostic, extending the utility of this education to serve as a foundation for any computational analysis running any dataset in any biomedical cloud platform. We illustrate these concepts using one of our own custom analyses, a study using the case-parent trio design to detect sex-specific genetic effects on orofacial cleft (OFC) risk, which we crafted in the biomedical cloud analysis platform CAVATICA.

Cloud Computing↗

PubMed1989

Motor control and the role of occupational therapy: past, present, and future.

Human motor behavior continues to evolve and, therefore, may never be fully understood. Still, occupational therapy treatment approaches that are based on neurophysiological principles are fairly well accepted, and there is much potential for the development of treatments that will facilitate recovery of function. Occupational therapy must face and confront its roles in relation to the field of motor control; a health care profession involved with performance and motor control issues cannot afford to ignore the rapid advances in neuroscience information and the parallel developments in the field of motor control. Rood (1980) stated that many people want a "womb with a view," so that they remain protected and yet passively observe the outside world. However, if occupational therapy is to remain current with new developments in the field of motor control, it cannot afford to be passive.

History, 20th Century↗

PubMed2026

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API.

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

API↗

PubMed1988

An individualistic approach to routine cadaver organ removal.

Consenting to the taking of one's organs after death is a moral duty--the duty to consent--which derives from a more general moral duty--the duty to attempt an easy rescue of an endangered person. These two duties can be justified within the framework of factual and value beliefs associated with the general intellectual orientation called "individualism," which informs the liberal democratic tradition in the spirit of John Locke. Individualists value personal liberty and would accept these two duties on the ground that personal liberty is likely to be better protected and advanced in a society that abides by them than in a society that does not. The same reasoning justifies a social policy of routine removal of cadaver organs. Individualists would find it prudent to give up their right to be buried whole and adopt a policy of routine removal of cadaver organs, with organs distributed according to some principle of fair allocation. Since they recognize that their own organs will be of no use to them after death, giving up their right to be buried whole will not be viewed as a significant sacrifice of personal liberty. Some people of basic individualistic sympathies may, however, embrace additional special values that favor their being buried whole. To accommodate such persons, two compromises on a policy of routine taking of cadaver organs are possible: Allow these persons to "opt out" of the system by signing a legally binding document prohibiting the taking of their organs after death, or require everyone to state on their driver's licenses a positive or negative decision concerning organ removal.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Cadaver↗