Reasonable Implications and Consequences of an Ethical Approach to Care

 

Ethical issues emerge when healthcare providers or patients have to make choices.  However, the choices made may not be ideal, resulting in moral distress and undermining relationships and quality of care. Thus, healthcare providers should comprehend ethical decision-making roles in their routine activities.  For instance, healthcare providers share patients’ sensitive information when coordinating care. Therefore,  the healthcare providers’ responsibility is to ensure that the information shared remains private and confidential using the nurses’ code of ethics to handle sensitive patient information.  For instance, Provision 4 of the nurse code of ethics requires nurses to protect, advocate, and promote the patient’s safety, health, and rights (Haddad & Geiger, 2018).  Therefore, understanding privacy guidelines is crucial when sharing protected health information to avoid legal lawsuits.  Also, nurses should remain ethical when dealing with clients from diverse cultural care. They should not stereotype or provide biased healthcare services because of the patient’s background.
Impact of Specific Health Care Policy Provisions on Outcomes and Patient Experiences
HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a healthcare policy that impacts patient experience and outcomes. The Act ensures appropriate protection of protected health information, and ensures authorized individuals access to sensitive information (Qin, 2019). Thus, HIPAA is crucial for patients because it ensures that business associates, healthcare clearinghouses, health plans, and healthcare providers of HIPAA-covered entities have safeguards to protect the patient’s sensitive and confidential health information. The policy also establishes guidelines that mandate organizations in the healthcare sector to control healthcare data access.  Thus, healthcare organizations restrict individuals accessing patients’ protected health information. Thus, HIPAA ensures that information stored, transmitted or disclosed to health plans and healthcare providers are subjected to stringent security controls. The policy also gives patients the authority to control information sharing.  Thus, HIPPA ensures that patients assume an active role in their healthcare.

However, HIPAA provisions may undermine care coordination.  For instance, the policy restricts the sharing of patients’ protected health information with covered entities.   The covered entity can only disclose protected patient health information for  treatment. However, the information can only be shared if both the covered entities have had or have a relationship with the patient whose protected health information is required (Qin, 2019).  Additionally, the protected health information should be related to that relationship, and the disclosure is within the act’s definition of healthcare operations. Thus, if the covered entity does not share a relationship with the patient in question, they are unlikely to share the protected health information, further undermining care coordination.