Ethics of information technology in healthcare

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. Mostly, the management of hospitals are interested in deploying advanced information and communication technology infrastructures because these infrastructures remarkably helps their business in improving the performance and better management of the resources (Rainer & Turban, 2008). Although, the information technology promises various benefits for the hospital administration, physicians, and patients, various serious threats also arise. Top of all, the increasing use of information technology poses certain ethical issues for the health care industry. This essay discusses the main ethical challenges of information technology in the health care sector.

Use of Information Technology in Hospitals

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. Most commonly, the information technology and systems in health care settings are used for the following tasks:

a. Manage the appointments of patients with over 100 specialized consultants; all these consultants conduct their OPD on different days and timings.

b. Creation of Patients' appointment cards and record files.

c. Managing the medical history records.

d. Collection of payments in various regards, and generating manual receipts.

e. Searching for the patient's record and medical history, in case he loses the manual appointment card given.

f. Inventory management for all the departments including pharmacy, X-ray, Operation Theater, canteen, Laboratory, Intensive Care Units.

g. Maintaining the attendance records of the employees.

h. Payments of fixed salaries to the staff, and commission based salaries to the consultants.

i. Taking food orders from the admitted patients and ensuring the timely delivery of quality food.

j. Development of health care policies, based on the research.

Ethical Considerations for Hospitals

As discussed above, most of the modern hospitals and clinics rely on information technology for automating their tasks, improving the productivity and efficiency of their staff and above all, to facilitate the patients. However, the extensive use of information technology poses certain ethical challenges towards the confidentiality of the patients. 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, 2011).

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, ...