Essay On Ethical Issues In Privacy

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Privacy Issues Associated With the Use of Health Information Technology
The use of information technology and communication technology in the health service, also known as informatics has helped a lot providing health service (Trotter & Uhlman, 2011). It has helped in providing easier and faster ways of recording and retrieving patient information, including the history of the patient’s health (Trotter & Uhlman, 2011), this has made the work a lot easier for the nurses and other health workers. However, there is a concern of privacy whereby malicious people access the patients’ records and information without authorization. This is an ethical issue that will be addressed here together with the solutions for the problem.
Background
Ethics is …show more content…

Protecting the privacy of patients has become a challenge despite the advantages of using information and communication technology in healthcare service since the information on patients are being accessed maliciously through the systems in the healthcare facilities.
In the case where this issue is not solved, or measures put in place, the patients will lose their confidence in healthcare system since the system will be providing a platform for crime to be committed. It would no longer be safe to give out information to the healthcare providers. With lack of information, it would affect the provision of healthcare service since the providers require the information. A lot of time and resources will also be wasted in trying to get information for example, the history of a patient’s health every time they visit the service providers, or carrying out tests every time the patient sees the healthcare …show more content…

It has made it very easy and fast for the physicians and the nurses to access patient’s information needed for diagnosis and provision of care (Trotter & Uhlman, 2011). For example, a nurse coming for a shift is able to access the information concerning a patient’s progress and medication as recorded by the nurse and physician who attended to the patient before. It will even be difficult for the nurse to be mistaken when attending to the patients.
b. Informatics and privacy issues
Privacy issues have become a concern to not only the patients, but to the healthcare provides too. This has led to informatics being a nightmare to the health sector since there is fast distribution of health information among people especially with weak or no security measure (Thede, 2010). This means that informatics has caused a lot of privacy issues since unauthorized people can access the private information.
c. Affected stakeholders
The health care provider and the patients are affected by the privacy issues affecting the healthcare sector. The private information belonging to the patients are exposed to unauthorized people, thus affecting the patients. The health care providers find it challenging to maintain the confidentiality and privacy of the patients thus affecting the trust the patients have in them and the system at

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