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Ethical Healthcare Issue

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Submitted By ksubkaran
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Ethical Healthcare Issues
HCS545
May 11th, 2015

Ethical Healthcare Issues Ethical issues arise in all types of industry no matter the magnitude of the issue decisions will have to be made regarding it. The health care industry is no different, some of those ethical issues include patient privacy (or lack of), transplant allocation, refusal of care, patient dumping, access of care, biomedical research and patient noncompliance with treatment. For this paper I will focus on patient privacy, the ethical issue of patient privacy is how patient information is getting leaked unintentionally. An examination of how each of the four major ethical principles can be applied towards this issue will be provided.
Patient Privacy
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) original intents were to enable workers to change jobs without fear of losing health care coverage (Liebler & McConnell, 2012), but HIPAA is more commonly known for protecting patient privacy. When organizations had to be HIPAA compliant by April 14, 2003 those organizations were required to train employees in the proper handling of protected health information (PHI), publish policies and procedures addressing the handling of patient medical information (Liebler & McConnell, 2012) . Any release of patient information for purposes other than treatment, payment, or operations requires written authorization (Buppert, 2002). Under the patient privacy rule EVERYTHING is protected, diagnosis, name, address, etc. With all the training provided to staff members, PHI is still being compromised intentionally and unintentionally. Intentionally can be in the form of receiving financial rewards for supplying demographic information such as social security numbers, insurance policy numbers, and even the simple act of letting a lawyer know about a patient who was involved in a car

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