Posted: March 28th, 2021

Nursing and Health Care Informatics Ethics and the Law

Nursing and Health Care Informatics Ethics and the Law

Paper details:

Nursing and Health Care Informatics Ethics and the Law Reference: Croll, P. (2010). Privacy, security and access with sensitive health information. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 151, 167–175. To prepare: • Reflect on this week’s Learning Resources, focusing on the ethical and legal issues associated with usage of data and health information. • For this Discussion, identify an ethical issue related to data collection or information management at your organization or one with which you are familiar. • Determine the potential liabilities that this ethical issue presents by reviewing the AMIA Code of Ethics. • Consider the legal aspects of your ethical issue and the steps that could be taken to avoid or minimize risk. • Describe your selected ethical issue. • Analyze the potential liabilities that this issue poses to the organization by referencing the AMIA Code of Ethics. • Formulate strategies that the organization could implement to address the ethical issue.

Nursing and Health Care Informatics Ethics and the Law
One of the ethical issues related to data management is the data privacy protection. A data user is required to take reasonable practical steps to safeguard personal data from accidental or unauthorized access (Yen, Phillips Kennedy & Collins, 2017). They should also ensure that erasure, processing use or loss do not occur to the data. There is focus to ensure that any use to the data does consider the harm that would affect the individual in case there is any breath.
According to the AMIA a member should advocate and work as appropriate to ensure that protected health information and other biomedical data are acquired, transmitted, recorded maintained, stored, analyzed and communicated in a secure, safe, reliable and confidential manner and that the data is consistent with the laws. The laws include accepted informatics standard, and security policies. Therefore, the individual is personally liable in the case that there is a breach in the information.
The legal issue that is involved in this case is the protection of private information. The HIPAA has set clear guidelines on the privacy of information provided by a patient. The healthcare professional has the responsibility to ensure that these regulations are adhered to in the daily practice (Yen, Phillips Kennedy & Collins, 2017). Mitigating this issue would requires that individuals maintain competence as informatics professionals.
Data privacy protection
Data protection is urgent and also complex. Protection is important because of the developments in technology driven and information intensive environment. Developments in the healthcare informatics have meant that there is a lot of information that the healthcare facility hold. However, these institutions have the responsibility of ensure that the information is kept securely.
The AMIA states that the institutions have the personal responsibility of ensuring that it develops regulations and polices that ensure that data is kept secure (Goodman, 2016). Failure to develop the required polices would often lead the organization to incur costs.
The organization can mitigate these issues through the development of polices that focus on the protection of data. The organization should also train its staff on the responsibility that they have in regards to data protection. Besides, there is need to put in place the required infrastructure that focuses on the security of data.

References
Goodman, K. W. (2016). Ethical and legal issues in decision support. In Clinical decision support systems (pp. 131-146). Springer, Cham.
Yen, P. Y., Phillips, A., Kennedy, M. K., & Collins, S. (2017). Nursing informatics competency assessment for the nurse leader: instrument refinement, validation, and psychometric analysis. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 47(5), 271-277.