Ethical Policy Development Case Study

Jerry McCall is an office assistant for Dr. William’s. Jerry has received training as both a medical assistant and Licensed practical nurses (LPN). During the time the receptionist is out to lunch Jerry is covering for her. Jerry is faced with a common problem in the health care field today. Jerry has been asked to call in a refill for Valium to a pharmacy for a patient. This paper will address why Jerry is not qualified to refill any prescription medication. If Jerry is protected if a lawsuit is filled. Jerry’s decision is a tough one, legal and ethical issues and advice will be provided for Jerry’s use.

Use of an EHR presents major opportunities for the compromise of patient’s personal health information (PHI). The facility must ensure proper safe guards are implemented and functioning properly at all times. Employees need to be educated on the safety measures to prevent breach of patient confidential health records. Privacy breaches can result from misuse or improper storage of PHI by the healthcare professional, by third party payers, or by lack of proper encryption in the EHR system itself (Burkhardt & Nathaniel, 2014). The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law that holds healthcare facilities and professionals accountable for keeping PHI confidential, patients to control

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the electronic health record mandate. Who started it and when? I will discuss the goals of the mandate. I will discussion will how the Affordable Care Act ties into the mandate of Electronic Health Record. It will describe my own facility’s EHR and what steps are been taken to implement it. I will describe the term “meaningful use,” and it will discuss possible threats to patient confidentiality and the what’s being done by my facility to prevent Health Information and Portability Accountability Act or HIPAA violations.

Lately I have been hearing a lot about security of patient’s health records and how people are losing their jobs behind accessing information that they have no need to be in. It got me to wondering just how secure our personal information is from prying eyes and how who is alerted when these prying eye are in information that doesn’t concern them. So, when I ran across this article “Security Audits of Electronic Health Information” and “HIPAA Security Rule Overview” it caught my eye and curiosity on how they might work hand in hand when it comes to protecting what information is accessed by personnel. So, I choose these articles to get more information on this topic.

Patient confidentiality is one thing that cannot be breached nor as a patient that you would want to be breached. In this day and age as healthcare professionals it is a very fine line of what breaching confidentiality is. We all want to know that when we are sick and in the hospital, the one thing that we can keep personal is our privacy which would include our health information. It is hard to imagine that in a state of vulnerability that some things must be disclosed to certain departments regardless of your desire to keep it private

Nurses are faced with ethical issues and dilemmas on a regular basis. Nurses must understand his or her values and morals to be able to deal adequately with the ethical issues he or she is faced with. Some ethical issues nurses are exposed to may be more difficult than others and the ethical decision making process is learned over time.

In today’s health care industry providing quality patient care and avoiding harm are the foundations of ethical practices. However, many health care professionals are not meeting the guidelines or expectations of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) or obeying the organizations code of ethics policies, especially with the use of electronic medical records (EMR). Many patients fear that their personal health information (PHI) will be disclosed by hackers or unauthorized users. According to Carel (2010) “ethical concerns shroud the

     Abstract:  Electronic medical databases and the ability to store medical files in them have made our lives easier in many ways and riskier in others.  The main risk they pose is the safety of our personal data if put on an insecure an insecure medium.  What if someone gets their hands on your information and uses it in ways you don't approve of? Can you stop them?  To keep your information safe and to preserve faith in this invaluable technology, the issue of access must be addressed.  Guidelines are needed to establish who has access and how they may get it.  This is necessary for the security of the information a, to preserve privacy, and to maintain existing benefits.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has set out the creation and maintenance of electronic health records (EHR) as the means by which patient care can be improved while the overall costs of healthcare to society can be driven down. However, the ability to consolidate patient records and increase their portability has increased their vulnerability to theft and exposure. Along with the requirement to create EHRs, HIPAA has mandated security requirements for a class of information identified as electronic protected health information (ePHI) in an effort to protect the confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from criminal misuse and general exposure. The iTrust Medical Care Requirements System (iTrust)

Sample Policy and Procedure TITLE: Security of protected information stored in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) DEPT: HIM SERVICES SUBMITTED BY: Madison Rogers DATE: June 1, 2017 APPROVED BY: Denice Saunders DATE: June 1, 2017 Effective Date: June 1, 2017 Purpose Design a policy and procedure for the security and monitoring of Protected Health Information (PHI) in your organization’s EHR policy.

The health care is changing with the advent of Electronic health record. EHR improves coordinated care and promotes easy access to patient care. This helps in improved patient involvement in healthcare and also make them to be better informed. However, there are security and privacy concerns while using EHR systems. Therefore, different security principles are needed to be applied to EHR systems. Information security (InfoSec) principles helps in protecting EHR systems. This principle includes the following:The information is not available to everyone and are not disclosed to unauthorized individuals, processes and entities. Measures are undertaken to ensure that sensitive information should not reach the wrong people while making right information

A patient records whether it is electronic, as a EHR or a paper record contains sensitive, personal, and private information about the patient and should not disclosed to any unauthorized individual, as well as used unwarrantedly. (Mir, May-June, 2011). Healthcare organizations, such as United General Hospital should have instructions for staff to follow in regards to handing and accessing patient records. In updating the management training manual for United General Hospital, it is required that all authorized staff abide the instructions while handling and accessing patient records. Upon handling and accessing patient records all required and authorized staff based on “a need to see basics” and for medical treatment and financial purposes

Two system components that meet the federal regulatory requirements that meets HIPPA and meaningful use requirements are privacy measures to prevent unauthorized access to patient’s records and the use of CPOE. The first system component is prevention of unauthorized access to patient’s records. Healthcare providers should access only the information necessary to do their job adequately and efficiently. This mean that providers are only allowed in patient’s records whose care they are involved in. in this health-IT system that is being implemented there is an application called “Break the Glass” that requires all providers to give and document their reasons for any unauthorized access to an EHR. A security screen will be displayed that requests

Privacy concerns in healthcare apply to both paper and electronic records. Today records can be exchanged over the Internet and they are subject to the same security concerns as any other type of data transaction over the Internet. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) were passed in the US in 1996 to establish rules for access, authentications, storage and auditing, and transmittal of electronic medical records. This standard made restrictions for electronic records more stringent than those for paper records. However, there are concerns as to the adequacy of implementation of this standard. As the ever-changing healthcare industry evolves, one key topic within the electronic health record (EHR) is privacy. The Federal government has set guidelines that all healthcare organizations will have to comply with in regards to electronic health transactions. Most supporters believe that the EHR will improve care and reduced costs, while transforming the health care system, but whether the privacy of the

The goal of AeH systems is to be non-restrictive in stipulations of in sequence accessibility to justifiable users. They make available incentives to the users to put into operation proper use of in turn. These incentives take the variety of liability entailed by penalties. Within our representation we regard as three types of users; a innermost health influence, patients, and HCPs. The health authority is the governing body responsible for administration the EHR system and administration its recruits i.e. HCPs. The strength authority defines default access levels for each HCP relevant to their role surrounded by the healthcare domain. The patients define their be in possession of admittance policies for the HCPs they recommend to give entrance to their health dealings according to individual privacy requirements. Using a predefined protocol, the two policies are mutual such that the final equipped policy assigned for each HCP satisfies in cooperation the patient’s privacy requirements and the HCP’s information requirements. HCPs who have been nominated by a patient to have access to his EHR will lodge convention requirements containing the required data types and the planned purpose(s) for access. These requests are processed using a knowledgebase containing EHR data types and correlated purposes. All convention of EHR data by HCPs is stored as transaction kindling for