FIU Week 5 Moral Dilemmas in Healthcare Informatics Discussion Please reply to the following two post 100 words one reference each #1 Shannon Del Orbe Bee

FIU Week 5 Moral Dilemmas in Healthcare Informatics Discussion Please reply to the following two post 100 words one reference each

#1 Shannon Del Orbe Been

Identify moral dilemmas in healthcare informatics that would best be approached with the use of an ethical decision-making framework, such as the use of smartphones to interact with patients as well as to monitor and assess patient health.

Telemedicine is a new model of care in which physicians’ responsibilities may play out differently from traditional patient interactions at a medical office or hospital. Policies should account for how telemedicine services can change communication, power, and perhaps fiduciary relationships between clinicians, between patients and clinicians, and between a patient’s family members, and how these changes can affect diagnosis and treatment decisions (Stanberry, 2018). Policies should also promote training for changes in clinicians’ roles and responsibilities related to telemedicine to ensure patient safety and ethical workplaces. Patients should be involved in designing telemedicine services to prevent assumptions that patients will be informed, cooperative, and compliant; to avoid intrusive, difficult-to-use applications; and to serve all patients, including those who are disabled and aged, and those who are not fluent in English.

Patient involvement would help promote shared decision-making so that each patient’s use of telemedicine services is mutually agreed upon by patient and clinician and can be changed or discontinued. Key people treating a patient and making decisions about care should have a good relationship with the patient and with each other, at least comparable to what that patient would have with care in-person, so as to establish trust and allow clinicians to understand patient and community values, and the patient’s living situations, behavioral health considerations, and ways of dealing with medical issues. Policies should be developed to ensure that patients’ decisions are freely made so that, for example, patients are not pushed into unwanted monitoring or other forms of remote care by their well-meaning children, clinicians, or caregivers. To address these ethical responsibilities, hospital, clinics, and insurers should develop policies for telemedicine that reflect the ethical guidance of organizations such as the AMA, the American and International Medical Informatics Associations, and the American Telemedicine Association (2017).

Reference

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Telemedicine. (2017). Essentials of Telemedicine and Telecare, 110-149. doi:10.1002/0470846348.ch6

Stanberry, B. (2018). The legal and ethical aspects of telemedicine. 1: Confidentiality and the patient’s rights of access. Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 3(4), 179-187. doi:10.1258/1357633971931101

#2 Stephanie Mortimer-Wallace

Medical personnel sometimes utilize their personal cell phones to take pictures of surgeries for teaching purposes or to refer patients to other specialists, for example when referring a patient to an oncologist for treatment, or these photos can be used for the purpose getting a second opinion or consultation from other colleagues (Al Balushi, 2019), and as the old adage goes, “a picture speaks a thousand words”. Utilizing patient information is very vital in the management and follow up of the condition for which the patient are seeking medical care but, is it ethically or morally right to transfer patient information utilizing your personal phone? Utilizing personal smartphone’s poses a risk for infringing on the rights of patients as these phones are used in places other than work. Before information of any kind is transmitted in a healthcare environment it should be established whether there is consent for the information transfer, how will the information be stored, who or how will the information be preserved, and how will the information be shared with other parties (McGonigle and Mastrian 2018).

Nurses are often required to assist in organizing patient care. This often requires passing on vital patient information between physicians and other members of the interprofessional team during the time the patient is admitted to hospital, in transition, or even after discharge. In my role as a nurse, one question came up that upon discharging a patient from your care to transitional care he refuses to have his records transmitted via a smart phone to the next care provider, what would you do? If the patient information is transmitted via smart phone without consent, the nurse is in breach of the patient information in that he refused to have his information transmitted. The patient could also attend his appointment without the necessary information and his transitional care could be compromised. However, I feel it is my duty to make the decision to inform the next care provider that the transition record could not be sent because the patient refused, and it would be irresponsible and unethical to transmit the information without the patients’ consent. From my perspective this is utilizing the duty framework.

In my view utilizing Master’s Essential II would be most appropriate for this discussion as it involves leadership skills that are ethical, critical, and necessary in decision making (AACN, 2011). Improvements to patient care coordination has been as a result of utilizing various technologies which has been demonstrated to allow nurse leaders the ability to provide patients with all of the necessary information they need, to improve both heath outcomes and increase patient satisfaction with the care they receive. As digital communication becomes more accessible, patients are becoming more connected to their healthcare team members and coordinated care is becoming more frequent (Phillips, 2015).

References

Al Balushi A. A. (2019). The Ethics and Legality of Using Personal Smartphone’s to take Medical Photographs. Sultan Qaboos University medical journal, 19(2), e99–e102. https://doi.org/10.18295/squmj.2019.19.02.003

American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), (2011, March 21). The essentials of master’s education in nursing Retrieved from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/education-resources/MasterEssentials11.pdf

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2018). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Phillips W. (2015). Ethical controversies about proper health informatics practices. Missouri medicine, 112(1), 53–57.