Healthcare Ethics: Privacy And Confidentiality Issues

Healthcare Ethics
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Healthcare Ethics
Healthcare administrators have key role in designing programs and establishing environments that directly affect health care delivery. In executing their duties, healthcare administrators are often faced with dilemmas requiring them to make tough decisions within a small span of time. Most of these decisions encompass one or more ethical components. In order to remain competent, healthcare administrators are expected to be prepared for such situations. The ensuing discussion explicates the ethical principles that healthcare administrators may use in solving ethical dilemmas.
One of the ethical dilemmas that healthcare administrators face relates to the issue of maintaining the right to privacy. Today, healthcare organizations rely heavily on technology to record, store and exchange sensitive information relating to their patients and other activities. Technological solutions such as electronic health records (EHRs) play a crucial role in enhancing the quality of care provided. Healthcare administrators have a responsibility to ensure that such technological systems comply with all established laws and regulations such as those defined by HIPAA (Oh & Gastmans, 2015). Regrettably, there circumstances where confidentiality need to be breached for example, to protect the patient from any harm or to protect an external stakeholder. This situation is problematic in that practitioners are obligated to maintain confidentiality and autonomy of their patients. A thorough understanding of existing rules and the ability of an administrator to analyze ethical principles involved is required in making an ethical decision when faced with this kind of dilemma.
There various ethical principles those healthcare administrators may use to make decisio...