Ethical & Legal Issues in Healthcare Informatics Essay

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Ethical & Legal Issues in Healthcare Informatics Essay

Ethical & Legal Issues in Healthcare Informatics Essay

Examine ethical and legal issues in healthcare informatics to understand how they impact the field. Get an overview of healthcare informatics, explore the law in healthcare informatics, and uncover more about ethics in healthcare informatics. Updated: 01/13/2022

Healthcare Informatics Overview

Kingsley, a registered nurse with a keen understanding of computers and healthcare, has joined the implementation team for a new electronic health record. His team has addressed ethical and legal issues with this new technology. Developing policies and procedures for staff and physicians to use in this new technology will guide safe and secure healthcare information in the facility.

Healthcare informatics is a design of communication, information, and documentation in an electronic health record (EHR). It’s necessary to work through legal and ethical issues before the purchase of this technology ever occurs. A successful go-live or launch of this technology depends on the team and the type of software chosen.

Let’s now take a look at some of the legal issues found in healthcare informatics.

Law in Healthcare Informatics

1. Protecting Health Information

It’s required by law to handle all patient health information with confidentiality, meaning no one should have access to the patient’s health record unless they’re actively caring for that patient and they should never share information with someone outside the patient care team. The cost of breaking confidentiality is high. Disciplinary action within the organization, lawsuits, fines, and professional regulatory body disciplinary actions, from state boards of nursing, for instance, may occur. Security extends from the confidentiality of the patient’s record to the actual cyber security of the hospital’s informatics systems. Keeping hackers out is a huge concern for both patients and organizations. Social networking is another area of concern. Kingsley’s team has produced a strong social media policy to keep patient information secure.

2. Health Information Technology Vendors

In 2016, over 4,000 healthcare facilities were using software or health information technology (HIT). This is an ongoing relationship between vendors and healthcare organizations. Strict guidelines must be followed by law for the HIT to be accepted by Medicare and receive payment for services rendered. The EHR must be certified as capable of handling the information and communication needs, provide security for patients’ information confidentiality, and be functional for staff and providers, including standardized care plans. Kingsley’s team will meet with several companies to choose the right health record.

Here are some vendors considerations that are usually taken into account:

• A good fit for the staff and providers for a long-term contract
• Flexibility of the vendor to meet the organization’s needs, since things can change quickly
• Partnership with the same quality and safety goals as the organization
• Complete training and support package meeting staff and physician needs throughout implementation and transition
• Ability to provide needed data collection tools, training, and design flexibility
• Security in place for EHR software and interface or communication with other programs
• Clear and concise curriculum for trainees to learn new technology

3. Healthcare Informatics and Patient Safety

A core responsibility of healthcare technology is to build the workflow with the patient’s safety in mind. At every decision point, there is error vulnerability for staff and patients. The design of the EHR must provide information and knowledge links in the record for staff, such as information about medication ordered. The vendor, organization, and provider must have common goals to keep the potential for errors low by decision-support, a built-in alert and guidance system to catch errors before they happen.

Kingsley has brought patient identification and accurate medication barcoding to staff in advance of the new technology. Every patient must have an armband with barcodes and every medication must also have barcodes to scan prior to giving medications. Safety alerts can pop up to prevent errors at this time.

The EHR needs to be easily understood, clearly visible, accessible, and organized for documentation and finding needed information about the patient quickly.

Ethical & Legal Issues in Healthcare Informatics Essay