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Health administrators are often invisible to patients, but they play a significant role in establishing programs and environments that facilitate the ethical delivery of care. Ethical leadership and decision-making are key components of a masters in health administration program, and help prepare the next generation of health care leaders to navigate the evolving challenges of health care in the United States. Here are four ethical dilemmas you can expect to face in your career as a health administrator.
Balancing Cost and Quality
Health administrators are often responsible for making financial decisions that impact the quality of care provided by the organizations they support. Sometimes you'll be confronted with competing priorities, like
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the need for additional staff, equipment in need of repair or replacement, and demand for access to new diagnostic tools. It is challenging to weigh the relative cost of each need against the potential benefits, and to balance the financial bottom line with the desire to always provide the best possible care to patients. Mitigating Legal Risk Malpractice and other lawsuits can be devastating to a medical practice. As a health administrator, you may be asked to work with staff to resolve complaints or issues before they escalate to the point of legal action. At times, this may include disciplining or firing a popular or valuable member of the team. On the other hand, fear of legal action can cause providers to engage in something known as "defensive medicine." Defensive medicine is the practice of making diagnostic or treatment decisions based primarily on a desire to avoid legal repercussions, rather than on the best interest of the patient. You may be asked to help ensure that the providers in your organization are basing their decisions on patients' needs before other factors. Navigating Confidentiality Health care organizations are increasingly relying on technology like electronic health records to record, store, and transmit sensitive information.
Administrators may play a role in ensuring that these systems adhere to all the relevant laws and regulations, like The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). However, there are circumstances under which confidentiality must be broken in order to prevent harm to a patient or outside party. You'll need a thorough understanding of these rules to help ensure compliance.
Managing Influential Relationships
In the course of an average day, you and your colleagues will work closely with any number of outside vendors who provide things like brand name medications, diagnostic equipment, software solutions, and more. But it's important that these relationships don't influence members of the organization to advocate one treatment or procedure over another. You may be asked to play an active role in monitoring staff and creating policies to prevent outside relationships from inappropriately affecting the manner in which care is delivered.
Health administrators are industry leaders, and have the power to shape policy that ensures good ethics in health care. By integrating basic principles of ethical leadership into your organization, you can help educate your colleagues at every level, and encourage policies and practices that lead to the highest quality of patient
care.
The five key areas of responsibility for healthcare leaders according the ACHE Code of Ethics are (Perry, 2014, 9g. 134-35):
... of potential threats such as unauthorized access of the patient information. Health care leaders must always remind their employees that casual review for personal interest of patients ' protected health information is unacceptable and against the law just like what happened in the UCLA health systems case (Fiske, 2011). Health care organizations need clear policies and procedures to prevent, detect, contain, and correct security violations. Through policies and procedures, entities covered under HIPAA must reasonably restrict access to patient information to only those employees with a valid reason to view the information and must sanction any employee who is found to have violated these policies.In addition, it is critical that health care organizations should implement awareness and training programs for all members of its workforce (Wager, Lee, & Glaser, 2013).
Planning included reaching out to other health organizations, objectives, and goals of health fair were established. The implementation includes getting volunteers, set up for the health fair. The evaluation of the process occurred throughout the implementation and changes were made as needed. The evaluation will be completed by gathering information from health booth to determine the number of participants. Review vendor and participant evaluations about the health fair including how they heard about the health fair, ratings of booths and suggestions for improvements. Record everything to determine changes. Reflection on past experiences and what worked and did not work.
. HIPAA privacy rules are complicated and extensive, and set forth guidelines to be followed by health care providers and other covered entities such as insurance carriers and by consumers. HIPAA is very specific in its requirements regarding the release of information, but is not as specific when it comes to the manner in which training and policies are developed and delivered within the health care industry. This paper will discuss how HIPAA affects a patient's access to their medical records, how and under what circumstances personal health information can be released to other entities for purposes not related to health care, the requirements regarding written privacy policies for covered entities, the training requirements for medical office employees and the consequences for not following the policy.
Module two deals with external influences in healthcare administration and the conflicts that may cause lack of growth in the organization. External influences can range from society, stakeholders, staff, and patients. Health administrators should be in agreement with staff and physicians to maintain proper ethics and safety for everyone. Society has a big influence of healthcare organizations with spending their money towards health insurance, medication, treatment services and exams. As long the healthcare organization has a well reputation built on trust, then consumers will spend on that healthcare organization. The stakeholders that take part in external influences on ethics are the vendors, technology specialists, maintenance, insurance
A law is a rule of conduct or action, required (governments endorse laws) to maintain order and public safety in case of a breakdown of law. The criminal & civil law is applied to health-care practitioners or providers, if criminal wrongdoing or negligence occurred in patient’s care. Ethics or moral values serve as the basis for ethical conduct. Our societal values, Family, and cultural values help form an individual’s moral value (Pozgar, 2014, p. 217). The Pozgar further suggests that the healthcare executives needs to understanding the development of law, sources of law, the meaning of different terms to effectively handle change in environment due to frequent policy implementations.
There are questions about transplant allocation in regards to the four major ethical principles in medical ethics: beneficence, autonomy, nonmaleficence and justice. Beneficence is the “obligation of healthcare providers to help people” that are in need, autonomy is the “right of patients to make choices” in regards to their healthcare, nonmaleficence, is the “duty of the healthcare providers to do no harm”, and justice is the “concept of treating everyone in a fair manner” ("Medical Ethics & the Rationing of Health Care: Introduction", n.d., p. 1).
• Improve and customize organizational procedures that replicate their organizations’ mission and ethical values. • They must be malleable enough to compact with the most of the ethical fears at all levels of clinical, administrative, occupational and organization. • They must attempt to offer various educational programs to all the committee members about the ethical values, and more stress must be kept on the universal matters of ethical decision making in the present culture of healthcare. • Healthcare executives must be able to stimulate learning prospects such as conducting an open discussion forums or meeting schedules regarding of ethical issues. • Every organization must have a separate committee only for ethics and must also include agents from different crowds like one from physicians, one from nurses, one from managers, one board members, one social workers, one attorneys, someone on behalf of patient community.
While the moral backing for public health in its current state may be sound, what many researchers fail to understand is that the many moral failings of its predecessors that color the legacy of public health internationally and at home. As discussed in the chapter “Colonial Medicine and its Legacies” within the textbook Reimagining Global Health arranged by Paul Farmer, before the conception of global health there was international health which sought to distribute health as a good horizontally across international, political lines. Under the framework of international health, public health workers became agents of a cold war enmeshed in the fiscal, geopolitical, and territorial struggles between two hegemons rather than the holistic value of community health. While international health as a framework has largely been abandoned, much of its rhetoric can be found within our current framework of public health such as the enumeration of certain parts of the world as "1st world", "2nd world",
Ethics is an individual’s conception of what they believe to be right or wrong. Ethics typically stem from moral values that individuals obtain during their life which are often influenced by society, culture, family, and religious beliefs. Healthcare professionals are often challenged to make ethical decisions that are preceded by law and moral values. Health information management (HIM) professionals have the responsibility to exhibit actions that reflect moral values and ethical principles while upholding state and federal laws. The following codes have been developed by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) as criteria for the HIM professional: AHIMA Code of Ethics, Standards of Ethical Coding, and Clinical Documentation
Currently, an imbalance exists, leading to nonproductive tensions (Nolan, Bisognano, 2006).” Clinicians often see themselves defending patients and professional standards against the finance department. They see themselves as the protectors of quality. The finance professionals see themselves protecting the resources of the organization. The finance department usually provides supervisors with weekly or monthly cost reports of expenditures against the budget (McConnell, C, 2010). This is difficult for management because the clinicians see that they need new equipment to help the patients and the finance professionals see unnecessary spending that could be saved for something more important. Management must figure out how to decipher how to keep their clinicians happy and finance professionals happy. Management must figure out how to handle difficulty between staff members and ways to reduce the cost but keep the quality of care up especially with the budget the finance department have gave
Healthcare administrators/managers usually work in different types of healthcare organizations such as hospitals, long-term care, mental/behavioral health facilities or nursing homes. Their professional activities include several major responsibilities, depending on the size of the organization and the level of employment. When it comes to morality, healthcare administrators possess their inherent protocols which cannot be encoded or examined. The routine of healthcare administrators is often fraught with ethical dilemmas that often go unnoticed since they are directly related to the ordinary part of the healthcare delivery.
Garrett, T. M., Baillie, H. W., & Garrett, R. M. (2010). Health care ethics: Principles and problems (5thed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Per Larson (2013), ethical issues in health care continually effect the health care industry. Listed where the condensed top 5 ethical issues health care leaders felt where the most challenging. For this discussion board, I have selected to debate the ethical issue of the importance of balancing care quality and efficiency in the health care system. I chose this ethical subject because I am passionate about not only providing mediocre care to patients, but providing a broad spectrum of holistic care that views the patient as a person and not just as a source of hospital revenue.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA), Confidential Information and Statistical Efficiency Act (CIPSEA), and the Freedom of Information Act all provide legal protection under many laws. It also involves ethical protection. The patient must be able to completely trust the healthcare provider by having confidence that their information is kept safe and not disclosed without their consent. Disclosing any information to the public could be humiliating for them. Patient information that is protected includes all medical and personal information related to their medical records, medical treatments, payment records, date of birth, gender, and