Ethical Issues: Improving Health Information Technology

Ethical Issues

Improvements in technology generally have invariably improved Health Information Technology. The ethical side of HIT however has not yet fully evolved to handle and guide the use of HIT. There are several ways to look at the issue of ethics as it affects Health Information Technology but efforts will made on traditional ethical perspectives of beneficence, avoidance of malfeasance, autonomy, and justice.

Firstly, there should be a valid separation between standard clinical care and clinical research. Usually, typical clinical care that is not part of a clinical trial does not have active oversight for ethical behavior and is generally assumed to be ethical if it conforms to general accepted procedures and standards of care. This

This includes measures to limit access to electronic information, to encrypt and decrypt electronic information, and to guard against unauthorized access to that information while it is being transmitted to others. Procedures and policies are required to address the following elements of technical safeguards:

• Access control - Allowing only access to persons or software programs that have appropriate access rights to data or PHI by using, for example, unique user identification protocols, emergency access procedures, automatic logoff, and encryption and decryption mechanisms.

• Audit controls - Recording and examining activity in health IT systems that contain or use PHI.

• Integrity - Protecting PHI from improper alteration or destruction, including implementation of mechanisms to authenticate PHI.

• Person or entity authentication - Verifying that a person or entity seeking access to PHI is who or what they claim to be (proof of

Research ethics

Conclusion

Health Information Technology has been a welcome dividend of the advancement of technology as a whole and ICT specifically. The improvement HIT has brought to healthcare has been largely helpful and welcome.

However, a valid argument can be made that the issues of security, ethics and legislation still heavily plague HIT. As far as the technology itself is concerned, there is much to say about advancement but the frameworks that should guide the use are still few, feeble and slow. If such concerns are not resolved fully, HIT if abused or hijacked with malicious intents can create problems of enormous proportions; problems larger the ones HIT set out to solve initially.

Adoption of HIT in any environment should be well thought out with more efforts placed on the use (policies, frameworks, ethics, legal, security) before the procurement of the physical technology itself. Policies to be adopted should be robust enough to manage the vast amount of scenarios in the health information scene and flexible enough to adapt to future changes that may strongly challenge the status quo by ways of larger data, new patient behavior, technology etc.

Until these are put in place, adopting a HIT may not be a smart