Medical Records Ethical Issues

Medical Records Ethical Issues

Phase 3 DB

Professor:

January 23, 2013

Assuming I was working in a medical facility in the medical records department, the boss of the department would like for the employees to know about medical ethics dealing with medical records. This paper will discuss two of the biggest ethical issues the medical records employees face and why these issues are so important to be aware of. As healthcare becomes more complicated and more numerical, data can with ease be moved around. A high degree of complexity of population information is of great importance for making quality and constraining costs better (Sabin, 2011).

One of the biggest ethical issues in medical records is confidentiality. A medical records staff is obligated to maintain a person who is receiving medical treatment data private. For that reason, the medical record employee must make certain that the person receiving medical treatment data is talked about only to that person and to other employees only when necessary. For example, the billing department will have to see the person's records in order to bill the person. An employee that has to make an appointment for a person at another clinic will have to has access to that person's chart. Staff members must keep away from talking about cases with people that do not work in the office, even if the person receiving medical treatment name is mentioned or not mentioned. Only the person receiving treatment can give up the confidentiality right. All patients' records must be put in a place where they cannot be seen by other patients or visitors (McGraw-Hill, n.d).

The second issue with medical records would be electronic health records. Electronic health records bring into existence disagreement or argument between various ethical principles. Electronic health records may present doing good because they are supposed to increase entrance to healthcare, make better the quality of care and health and make cost less. Rights of a person are endangered when their health information is shared or linked without the person knowing it. Faithfulness is breached by the disclosure of many people receiving treatment health data through mistakes or theft. Not having enough faith in the safety of health information may cause people receiving treatment not to give delicate data. As a result, their treatment may be weakening. Justice is broken when people, because of their social, economic or age do not have the same access to health data materials and public health services (Layman, 2008).

In conclusion the data found in medical records is viewed as belonging to the patient, and the patient has an ethical right and in most cases a legal right to quick and entire access to this data (AAO, 2013). Medical ethics