Question

In Healthcare industry : For the ethical issues that you identified, discuss the potential negative impacts for individuals. What is the potential for unintentional downstream impacts? How should the industry respond to these ethical issues? Be specific and prescriptive in your response. Are there ethical aspects that you feel have been completely resolved through common business practices, formal agreements, legal rulings, or regulations? Which ethical aspects still need to be resolved?

Answer 1

Here, let me share one ethical issue. There are heath care organizations who don’t take sufficient measure on keeping the patients data with confidentiality. As Patient’s various medical data should be kept with confidentiality, such medical data could include current health condition, medicines are used by the patients, etc. it will have several negative impact on the individual patients. Such negative impacts are patients may feel unsecured and not all information should be shared as with sharing such medical situations and information could lead to bring more controversy and critiques within the public or society. So, patients mind and daily activities could be distracted, various important milestones can be missed as Patients will feel uncomfortable.

Things could be potential for unintentional downstream impacts; health condition of the patients could be going bad, as, Patients get distracted due to release of their private health information. Patients could not keep sufficient mind for their recovery.

It could bring negative outcomes towards Healthcare organization. As, healthcare organization could not put their full attention in the recovery works, Doctors, physician and their daily life and activities get impacted, here, not all the medical information of patients should be disclosed to public.

Industry should consider technological improvement and build Electronic health data record system in place that will keep patients’ medical information and communication fully secured and confidential. Not everybody can assess such information, there would be log in and password to access the data, only necessary party like specific doctor, administrator and patients and their relatives could access specific amount of data.

Yes, there are ethical issues that are resolved by health care societies and organization, one of them is ethical issues associated with informed consent. Patients must provide the consent before having any operations or before taking drugs, etc. here, unethical situation could be physician could insist patients to take drug and patients is not aware about such drug, hence, healthcare organization has resolved such situations and made their system legally compliant by taking informed consent from each patients and patients needs to provide their consent before any procedure takes place.