HLSC220 Health Care Ethics

Introduction

The health care system of Australia is considered to be one of the best healthcare system of the world. It provides the health care service users with sage, quality as well as affordable healthcare. In spite of affordable healthcare system, the Australian health care system is facing major challenge due to aging workforce leading to lack of needed support to deal with the increasing number of patients. Enhanced number of patients with lower number of the required health care service providers are leading to issues like medical errors.

Tubaishat (2019) have highlighted that digitization of health care data can lead to better coordination between the health care service provider as well as healthcare service users. In addition, digitization makes it easier for the healthcare service provider to maintain a medical history. In traditional data recording system, files and folders are used for saving data by patients which often leads to medical errors and other types of data related issues. Similarly, in Health Care homes where data is recorded by the nurses with the help of tradition patient recording systems, it often leads to medical errors, inappropriate data recording and other disparities. Given the fact that Australia is suffering from aging population, a significant number of healthcare service users are from the elderly population and suffering from critical healthcare issue (Khow & Visvanathan, 2017). Bersani et al. (2020) have supported the fact stating, the nation provides institutional long term care to approximately 20 percent of the population who are aged above 80 years (Henderson et al., 2017). Thus, even a trivial medical error can lead to fatal consequences. This fatal consequences can be prevented with the help of digitalization of data.

Aldosari (2017) have highlighted the Electronic Health Recorder (EHR) system as one of the most effective digitization strategies that can ensure safe health care provision. As per the researchers, given the fact that a significant number of HealthCare homes are facing issues in dealing with the increased number of patients with a limited number of nurses and physicians, random medical error is taking place (Mokoena, 2017). As a result, a significant number of health care homes have already implemented the EHR system to prevent increased rate of patient dissatisfaction and mortality rate due to data recoding error leading to inappropriate treatment (Katurura & Cilliers, 2018). Ahmadi and Aslani (2018) have highlighted that organizations who have implemented EHR system with cloud computing have seen significant positive impact on patient health outcome and patient safety, compared to organizations that uses traditional patient data recording system (Nirabi & Hameed, 2018).

 In Electronic health record (EHR) refers to a digital version of the patient chart that enables the health care service providers to record patient’s data, contains the medical and treatment history of the patients that can be accessed by the healthcare staffs at the time of requirement (Katurura & Cilliers, 2018).  As per Krousel-Wood et al. (2018), the EHR system enables the healthcare service providers to access the patient’s records on a more rapid basis that results in an effective and efficient care. Due to shortage of workforces, nurses often force difficulties in treating a huge number of patients simultaneously.

As per Kibria (2018), the current nurse to patient ratio for incentive care is as high as 1: 8 while the normal ration is expected to be 1:4 for registered nurses. This is leading to high word load and stress level of nurses. High work stress level, in turn, is resulting in enhancement in the frequency of medical errors, delay in provision of care due to delayed retrieval of data and other issues. The EHR system poses the potential to prevent medical errors since, once recorded the same data is accessible to all the healthcare staffs. Additionally, it ensures rapid retrieval of data that enables the healthcare service providers to provide faster intervention to the patients. The EHR system reduces the total amount of time required for providing intervention to the patients and thus reduces the stress of handing multiple patients (Tubbs-Cooley et al., 2019).  Additionally, EHR system provides the physicians with effective health analytics which help them in recognizing the patterns, predict the diagnoses as well as recommend potential treatment options (Wang & Song, 2018). These analytics often leads to more successful overall patient’s results rather than depending on the trial an error method.

Balikuddembe and Reinhardt (2020) have highlighted how digitization of patient record can lead to automated administration of tasks and thus lowers the effort and stress of the healthcare service providers, In USA, administrative expenses results in more than quarter of total hospital expenditure (McKay et al., 2019).  This is not only higher than majority of the first world countries, but it leads to physicians and nurses spending less than one third of the time in administrative tasks rather than focusing on patient care. Digitization of patient data possess the potential to lower the amount of time spend in administrative works. Additionally, storing records digitally eliminates the risk of misplacement, damage or alteration sensitive data along with eliminating the risk of theft. Additionally, mistakes and errors that are caused to legibility issues as well as handwriting can be eliminated through digitization patient data as well (Kantor, Bright & Burtchell, 2018).

When it comes to making the digitalized data freely accessible to healthcare staffs, it is crucial for the mentioned organization to ensure that the data is available to the healthcare staffs who are responsible for treating the patient (Pramanik, Pareek & Nayyar, 2019).. However, it should be ensured that the free access should only be provided to healthcare service users who are directly associated with the care of the patients.  The key reason behind this is availability of information can help the healthcare service providers to provide effective and immediate care to the patients. As per Ramya et al. (2018), one of the key reason behind delay in patient care includes lacks of accessibility of data to the healthcare service providers. Even in this era of technological advancement, a significant number of health care home ensuring traditional patient data care system does not enable free access to the patient data to the nurses. This makes it difficult for the nurses and physicians to know the case history of the patient, understand the issue of patient  and then provide effective intervention to deal with the issue. This in turn leads to delay in health care service provision. Kibria (2018) highlighted that in critical care department in Australia, more than 12 percent of the patient death takes place as a result of delay in intervention. Free accessibility of data to the nurses can prevent such fatal consequences from taking place.

While data should be made freely accessible for healthcare staffs who are directly related to the patient care, effective policies against any breach of confidentiality and privacy of the patient should have  major consequences like high penalization and even imprisonment depending on the vitality of the cases. Availability of patient data in healthcare staffs who are not related to the patient care can lead to security issues (Werner et al., 2019). As per the Privacy act 1988, it is the responsibility of the healthcare service providers to ensure that the data shared by the patient is kept confidential and is only shared with the authorized individuals. Hence, health care service provider are stipulated to follow the same in order avoid facing major consequences.

Reeves et al. (2020) have highlighted a series of reason behind ensuring data security in healthcare. Data security is considered to be a highly crucial part of healthcare industry since it involves protection of the confidentiality of the patient information along with complying with regulation like those mandated by HIPPA (Wade et al., 2019). Making healthcare data of all patient accessible to all healthcare service providers can result in breach in confidentiality and privacy. Health data of patients if freely accessible to all the employees could be at a risk of being stolen, shared online or obtained by disgruntled employees, vendors and contractors (Detsky et al., 2017). Hence, while digitalization of data is highly crucial to ensure safety of the patients, the data should be made freely accessible only to the healthcare staffs who need the data to treat the patient.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that digitization of patient data is highly crucial to ensure the safety of the patients. Along with this the data should be made freely accessible in order to prevent issues like delay in provision of care.  Given the fact that a significant number of HealthCare homes are facing issues in dealing with the increased number of patients with a limited number of nurses and physicians, random medical error is taking place. organizations who have implemented EHR system with cloud computing have seen significant positive impact on patient health outcome and patient safety, compared to organizations that uses traditional patient data recording system. Health data of patients if freely accessible to all the employees could be at a risk of being stolen, shared online or obtained by disgruntled employees, vendors and contractors. Hence the data of patient should be made accessible to nurses and physicians who are in directly associated with the treatment procedure of the patients.

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