Ethics, Privacy, and Security Implication to Healthcare - Essay Sample

Recent research indicates that people are leaving at a time of information era due to the rapid development and use of technology. In hospitals, most of the medical details for patients are stored electronically. However, in some occasions, ethical issues concerning the sharing of the patient medical health records have emerged. In most cases, the patients have complained while others have taken legal action against some hospitals after information containing their medical data were shared to the public without their knowledge thereby jeopardizing their autonomy (Denecke, 2105). Therefore, the increasing in leakages of patient information as raised severe ethical issues among the patients on the ability of the hospital to manage the information that they give them

Therefore, healthcare institutions have been putting all the necessary efforts on technology to ensure that the confidentiality and preservation of the health data from the patients are protected (Bates, 2014). Many healthcare facilities have encountered the problem of patient medical data leakages by allowing only authorized people to have access to the information. The user access is grounded on a pre-established role that is based on privileges (Anwar, 2015). The hospital management identifies users, decides the level of data to access and shared by assigning such individual username and passwords.

Security breaches within the technology often threaten privacy when medical data of the patient are made public without their consent (Angst, 2017). The recent incident that took place at the Howard University Hospital in Washington as indicated that inadequate security of the data can affect a significant population. The prosecution of hospital technicians for using her position to unlawfully gaining access to the patient information is an example of a strict measure that has been taken to protect the integrity of the security system. Security measures like intrusion detection software, firewalls, and antivirus soft wares have been used to protect the security of the data

References

Angst, C. M., Block, E. S., DArcy, J., & Kelley, K. (2017). When Do IT Security Investments Matter? Accounting for the Influence of Institutional Factors in the Context of Healthcare Data Breaches. MIS Quarterly, 41(3), 893-916.

Anwar, M., Joshi, J., & Tan, J. (2015). Anytime, anywhere access to secure, privacy-aware healthcare services: Issues, approaches, and challenges. Health Policy and Technology, 4(4), 299-311.

Bates, D. W., Saria, S., Ohno-Machado, L., Shah, A., & Escobar, G. (2014). Big data in healthcare: using analytics to identify and manage high-risk and high-cost patients. Health Affairs, 33(7), 1123-1131.

Denecke, K., Bamidis, P., Bond, C., Gabarron, E., Househ, M., Lau, A. Y. S., ... & Hansen, M. (2015). Ethical issues of social media usage in healthcare. Yearbook of medical informatics, 10(1), 137.