2 original discussion board posts H e a l t h M e d i c a l

Create 2 responses to 2 original discussion board posts at least 300 words + 3 references no older than 5 years. the original post will be provided. basically creating a response for each post.

for response 1 – Gabrielle

Hi Class,

Health informatics deals largely in handling patient information. Ethics a large part of all healthcare fields, health informatics included. Ethics is the foundation of good patient care and relationships. When it comes to health informatics, many of the ethical considerations are related to the handling of patient information. Patients’ personal information such as address and social security numbers as well as medical records and health information are considered sensitive information and are protected. There are laws that protect such information such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA covers the sharing of patient information as well as the technology allowed to store and deliver patient information. With the increasing use in technology in health informatics, there is an increase in ethical dilemma. For example, improper or inaccurate coding in a patients file may lead to over or under compensation for a medical procedure. Short cuts such as reusing the same narrative for documenting a patient encounter as a previous encounter may also have the same result. Sharing patient health information between providers also adds ethical considerations. Information that is easier to access is harder to protect. With the increase in access to information, those in healthcare must rely more on ethical decision making and improving technological security in order to vigilantly protect patient information. 

for response 2 – Dylan

Hello Everyone,

As we all know ethics is the moral coe we go off of to do things, each person, industry and professionalism can have a wide range of ethical codes. The Healthcare occupation ethical standards can often be viewed as the strictest and most important, after all the livelihood of people is at stake with every administrative, intervention, or any other tasks at medical treatment facilities.

Health informatics allows us to take these huge amounts of hard copy and electronic data of patients and organize, protect, and manage them. This is extremely important, just imagine the last time you got a prescription bottle from the pharmacys, think of all of your personal information being printed on that bottle. A security breach of electronic health records could provide the wrong people with the necessary information to cause serious damage to your life.

For this reason I find that confidentiality is the most important of the ethical considerations when performing health informatics and healthcare as a whole. We can see many of the measures that must be taken in the case study presented in the reading this week. John has to go through several security measures to set up his computer and complete training. Measures such as the verification that John requires the internet for his services. Because of different laws and ethical movements we all must comply with privacy act laws and adhere to the AHIMA code of ethics to ensure the privacy of the member we provide care is secured. (Biedermann, S & Dolezel, D 2017)