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Ethics of information technology in healthcare

Introduction

Over the past few years, the use of information technology has become a vital ingredient for continuous success of hospitals and health care industry. Research shows that development of advanced information technology infrastructure remarkably helps the business in improving the performance and better management of the resources (Rainer R.K. & Turban E., 2008). While the computer based information and communication technology offers the efficient means for patient care, it also poses certain ethical issues for the health care industry. This essay discusses the main ethical challenges of information technology in the health care sector.

Discussion

As technology advances, it creates some issues in addition to, providing benefits. The case is same with the introduction of information technology in health care sector. The information technology is widely in use by hospitals and clinics, for facilitating patients with electronic health record management, and online health information. However, it poses certain ethical challenges.

The information system authorities of US consider ethics as the major component of the healthcare system. There are many important ethical questions related to the use of patient data mining, electronic health records, clinical based decision systems and internet based consumer health information (Winkelstein P.S., 2011, pp.139).

The computerized patient records system, commonly known as Electronic Medical Records system (EMR) optimizes the process of hospital's information management. These computerized records facilitate both the hospital staff and patients, as it significantly reduces the burden of paper record keeping. However, this facility poses the equally important ethical challenges. The most important challenges of EMR are maintaining the privacy, and confidentiality of patient's data at an appropriate level of security. As these systems connect to the networks, to enable the patients and consultants to access their data everywhere, security threats arise. Some patients ...