Roles As Leaders In The Field Of Medicine : Case Study

As individuals become proactive in managing their health there has been an increase in the popularity of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. This increase in popularity further coincides with testing prices declining as a result of advances in technology. With widely accessible testing available to the general public it has become more important for the individual to be well informed. There are various positive and negative consequences connected with all types of DTC genetic testing. Consequences and general knowledge which a individual should be informed on while they are considering getting the test done.

It is patients’ right to opt for genetic testing on their own DNA, although they are accepting a great risk by doing so.

The Public Health field is constantly changing and adapting to a new environment and changes that are occurring worldwide. Many of the Leadership and Management Skill trends that are affecting Public Health are the demographic shifts that are occurring in the US population. Accountability in relation to public responsiveness, assessing emerging health risks, and changes in health services delivery and financing, as well as leadership geared towards being collective and with less stress being place on the individual, are various trends that are affecting different forms of management. Within this paper, I will be examining collective leadership and how that will affect work at the individual level. Many do not fully understand what kind of role that Public Health and more specifically Public Health agencies play in their health and everyday lives,

The inclusion of genetic testing into Electronic Health Records impacts the overall healthcare of patient’s because it informs the physicians and other medical professionals the selection of effective treatment or preventive action. A manager’s responsibilities are to implement policies to protect the confidentiality, privacy, and security of genetic tests results and information of patient’s. Policies contributing to potential discrimination acts are also advised because genetic/genomic testing reveals a patient’s physical characteristics.

Genetic testing has become a highly controversial issue among both the general population and the scientific community. It is a process that exposes a person’s entire genome sequence, allowing it to be read and evaluated to identify potential risks for genetic diseases or diseases that could be passed onto offspring (Holt Productions, 2012). With thousands of genetic tests already being used, and more being established, it seems logical to put this growing technology to use. Some agree that it is a person’s right to know and understand his or her genetic makeup. However, others argue that, despite the benefits of genetic testing, caution should be used to carefully inspect the risks associated with this new technology.

Knowledge of the human genome, and an increase in the availability of genetic testing at lower cost has made genetic testing more popular.

In recent discussions of medical advancements, a controversial issue has been genome mapping poses risks to its patients. On the one hand, some argue that it is going to be time consuming and costly. On the other hand, however, others argue that this can be a breakthrough in medicine. In sum, then, the issue is what America’s next step towards medical advancement is going to be. While some believe genome mapping poses many unseen risks, genetic testing can help identify unsurfaced illnesses.

These advancements in science are giving people amazing new perspectives on how to go about their medical lives, though all that information can potentially be harmful to citizens. How the government and other agencies, such as insurance companies, intervene and try to gain access to this information for its own personal benefits can affect whether or not people will use it. This technology, not being held under the FDA regulations, make it very scrutinized by the government in association with knowledge about possible mutations that could lead to diseases. Government agencies, such as the GAO or FTC, claim that these companies are “mislead[ing] consumers by making predictions that are medically unproven and so ambiguous that they do not provide meaningful information to consumers1.” The companies would argue that the purpose for the DNA sequencing is to give insight to possibilities that could affect the future health of its customers and would say that they aren’t giving a diagnosis of any diseases or cancers. Of course, the beneficial use of this technology to the government in fighting crime isn’t related to their stance on how non-meaningful their medical advice is.

There were approximately 300 genetic tests available that time. It is significant to note that the reference sequence of human genome was completed by Scientists in April 2003 (Hudson et al, 2008) and current genetic tests encompass over 1500 conditions. Barclay and Markell (2007) explained the ability to establish and document a person’s genetic composition is known as genetic mapping. It must be noted that genetic mapping was achieved through the Human Genome Project (HGP) as a collaborative international research program (Barclay & Markell, 1999). Genetic information was considered to be adequately different from other health related information thus the need for special legal protection (Ginsburg,

Eric S. Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute, a science research center at Harvard and M.I.T., said resolving these issues is crucial to taking advantage of the knowledge hidden in our genomes.“If we are going to solve cancer, it’s going to take a movement of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of patients willing to contribute information from their cancer genomes towards a common good,” Dr. Lander said. “We are going to need to have ways to have patients feel comfortable doing that. We can’t do it without a foundation of respect and trust.”

Newborn genome screening is an issue that will becoming increasingly important in the coming decades. It has the potential to bring about many early diagnoses which could have a large impact on healthcare. This will only occur though if states can uniformly adopt a standard set of tests to be screened for. Equally important is the subject of uniformed consent. When we apply these variables to the 6 steps process we can fully compare the benefits and risks. This gives insight into taking the most appropriate actions in the future.

• Does a provider have the right to document genetic testing results in the patient’s medical record? When is it appropriate to document this information in the record?

Or worse, there are disparities to those individuals who are at high risk for disease that don’t have access to the first step, genetic screening. To resolve this societal imbalance, state and federal regulation dictating both medical screening and intervention needs to be mandated. Including a panel of medical experts is required to provide critical insight to a multitude of factors. The true success of preventions is dependent on fiscal assignment to either the insurance companies or to the ACA in screening and in treatment.

As scientific knowledge advances in our society, the medicine advances as well. Genetic testing has grown in numbers over the past couple of years. However, people still continue to ask themselves whether the information from genetic tests are worth knowing. At first, I thought the benefits of genetic testing outweighed the negatives of genetic testing. On the other hand, after reading three articles, I believe genetic tests are not as important as previously thought.

There has being a reduction of cost of genome sequencing in the last couple of years, however some ethical and social problems of genome sequencing are the privacy of the patient and discrimination risks. With the current evolvement of technology, keeping information safe is hard therefore there are risk of information becoming public which may affect charges for health or life insurance and stigmatization. Also, with genome sequencing there are secondary (random) findings which may cause more apprehension or concern for the patient. With these findings, medical professionals are faced with the decision if they should inform the patient or not.