Examples Of Ethical Issues In Health Care

With today’s fast paced environments and with current trends and advancements in technology there is a growing need to automate the world of healthcare. During the course of a person’s life, the information of his or her health is typically stored in many different places including paper charts and electronic records. Increased cost due to inefficiency, compromised care due to an incomplete picture of a person’s health history and waste of time and resources can all be a result of the lack of consistency of how and where to store health information. Not only can the management of health information and workflows through electronic systems help with efficiencies, but there is also a federal mandate requiring all healthcare providers to move

Cases regarding the ethics of research, patient rights, and patient privacy are just a few of the areas that can cause dilemmas when it comes to ethics. In an article published the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics the dilemma of privacy in particular is discussed as it relates to the deployment of a hypothetical national database of health information for use by public health officials and epidemiologists for the good of public health. As noted “such a change could lead to vast increases in the amount of personal patient data shared with public health officials” (Goodman, 2010, p. 60). There are several ethical questions that could be raised here. Does use of a patient’s information in a database violate their privacy? How is it determined that they have given consent to use their information? Does use of this information put patients in a position of being research subjects? These questions show use of EHR information requires much consideration of ethical

According to HealthIT.gov (2013), penalties will start in 2015 with a 1% decrease in reimbursement of physician fees and adjust down by 1% every year with a maximum of 5% in 2018 and there after. In 2011 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) developed a financial incentive program to help aid with the costs of implementing EHRs. The incentive program is staged over several years and participants must go through an attestation process to show they are using their EHR in a meaningful way in order to receive payment. Some of the challenges with this program are pointed out in an article that reports on a study that was conducted in 2012 by the Government Accountability Office regarding success of practices who received support in achieving MU by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Regional Extension Centers (RECs). The results of the study showed that practice issues, vendor issues, attestation process issues and MU measures, all present a variety of challenges for implementation. Using the results from the study, the RECs will be able to identify and categorize the challenges “so best practices, tools, and resources can be developed and targeted to groups who need the most assistance” (Heisey-Grove, Danehy, Consolazio, Lynch, & Mostashari, 2014, p. 148) and therefore