Role Of Ethics In Healthcare: 5 Important Points

By Greg Garner

HIPAA, which is an acronym for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was primarily passed in order to protect the privacy and accountability of the patients medical history and records even during an electronic exchange by the health care providers such as insurance group, clinics and hospitals. HIPPA came in effect in 2003 and boasts these main features or points below.

Consumer control: It gives rights to customers to recognize how their PHI (Protected Health Information) is being used and processed. These rights allow the consumers to be up to date regarding the providers privacy practice, examine and duplicate their medical reports, ask for amendments and corrections to their medical records, confine exposure of their PHI, get an account of all non-routine uses and disclosures of PHI and criticize to the office performance and HHS about any Privacy law violation.

Limitations of use and expos of PHI: It reduces the exposure of PHI of consumers to the minimum. The uses include the sharing, utilization and applications of data whereas exposure means the transfer of data to third person or its access by other.

Make certain the security of PHI: It demands covered entities to take up written privacy policies and measures.

Establishment of accountability: There are civil or criminal penalties for those violating the privacy policies and procedures.

Balance of public responsibility with privacy protections: It allows the disclosure of the patients data without his authorization for some public needs, such as reporting of a disease.

There is a lot with regard to HIPAA which has made the practitioners worried. As people might know, this act ensures that the practitioners must keep the confidentiality of patients thoroughly with very few exceptions. This has launched numerous disputes, since, in some cases, a practitioner feels it is their moral obligation to inform others of something, but the law prohibits them. Here, is where ethics and HIPAA confront on a level which is above the law.

There are exceptions to the law, but they are few and kind of rare. Such exceptions include:

The patients condition is harmful to everybody in the surrounding environment. Therefore, the confidentiality treaty can be broken.

The patient has the tendency to harm themselves. In that case, the practitioner must do everything in their power to prevent that.

The patient has been withholding crucial information and, therefore, their own rights to confidentiality are broken.

There are a few more exceptions, but they do not cover the full scale of the moral grounds which might be broken. When HIPAA was to release, there was a thorough dispute. Upon conversing about the moral grounds, one practitioner stood up and posed the following case example regarding ethics and HIPAA.

Lets say a patient has a condition which may harm her fetus, but she refuses to tell her new doctor about it. Her old practitioner knows everything about it, but he is obliged by law to not discuss it without the patients consent. Here, moral boundaries are being broken in favor of the law. The disputes revolving around the boundaries of HIPAA have not been cleared yet.

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