Managing
  Medical Resources

The Physician Charter on Medical Professionalism recognizes that resources for health care are finite, and establishes the principle that physicians must be committed to the just allocation of those finite resources. The ABIM Foundation’s “Managing Medical Resources” project was designed to help reconcile two apparently conflicting ethical precepts in the Physician Charter on Medical Professionalism; namely, the apparent conflict between the principle of the primacy of the patient and the commitment to just distribution of finite resources. In July 2006, ABIM Foundation convened a Managing Medical Resources working group and a resulting paper “Managing Medical Resources: A Return to the Commons?” was published in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (2007) 297(22): 2518-2520.