The Pros And Cons Of Electronic Health Records

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In the 21st century, technologies have a huge impact in today’s society. Electronic Health Record (EHR)… According to Health Information Technology, an Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a digital version of a patient’s paper chart that make patients’ records available instantly to authorized users. It contains patients’ medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory test results. Meanwhile there are positive impacts of HER system, it raises up some new ethical concerns of application in primary ethical principles which are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice and confidentiality.
Because of patient’s autonomy, Electronic Health Record system must allow patients …show more content…

Privacy of patients will be violated if the health care providers give out the information to a third party to whatever the reason is. “Instant retrieval and information exchange through EHRs improve care, but also create the risk of unauthorized use, access, and disclosure of private patient information, raising confidentiality and privacy concerns. Unauthorized access could also have implications for patient family members if genetic information is involved.” (Sulmasy & Lopez & Horwtich, …show more content…

“Autonomy as a concept means that the person is self-ruling” (Morrison & Furlong, 2014), that means patients have the right to control over their medical records. EHR will contain important and sensitive health date of a patient; as the result, patients should be able to view, comment on the content entered by health care professionals. This act may result as a beneficence because the patients will be able to proofread their medical histories. Another issue violated patients’ autonomy is ownership of the records. Companies, that created HER software, may claim the ownership of the record. At the same time, hospitals or healthcare providers also may claim the ownership of the date because they are the one who adding the information and using it. Aside from all of that, the true ownership of the date is the patient because it is their history; therefore, they should be able to make the