Human lifespan has increased due to the latest advancements in technology over the past few decades. Health care has become very important in today’s world and involve activities like prevention, diagnosis and treatment for illnesses. A health care system mainly includes three critical components that work in tandem to deliver health services.
(a) Healthcare consumers are the ones in need of healthcare services.
(b) Health care providers are those who provide services like physicians, nurses, laboratory technicians among other staff.
(c) We also have health care delivery systems – the public and private agencies or organizations that plan, finance, co-ordinate delivery of healthcare services like infrastructure, medicines and insurance agencies.
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There are many ethical and legal issues also involved in different scenarios. For example, abortion may be considered legal, but a large part of the population including some health care professionals may not consider it as ethical. Other complicated scenarios include medical staff deciding on decisions taken on allowing death to people on life support systems who have very low chances of survival or recovery. There are some other areas which are can cross the ethical lines like confidentiality of patient information, medical staff engaging in relationships with patients, and taking consent of patients before certain …show more content…
Confidentiality in health care has a dual aspect with it being both legal and ethical. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in USA have laws on how the patient information should be handled. The HIPAA Privacy Rule addresses the saving, accessing and sharing of medical and personal information of any individual, while the HIPAA Security Rule more specifically outlines national security standards to protect health data created, received, maintained or transmitted electronically, also known as electronic protected health information (ePHI). (What is HIPAA Compliance). Electronic health information systems also need to securely manage patient data to avoid breaches of privacy and security along with storing and transmitting this information across multiple systems. Insurance companies will still be restricted to some information of the