Assignment: GCU Online Library

Assignment: GCU Online Library
Assignment: GCU Online Library
Using the GCU Online Library and the Internet, research three sources and write a 750-1,500-word essay on the topic provided below.
Topic: There are many ethical and moral decisions to be made when drugs are available in a health care facility. As a department manager, develop a set of procedures and protocols regarding the handling, storing, and monitoring of drugs. Be sure to include generic drugs, controlled drugs, and all charting that may be necessary. Apply your policies to Deanna, an employee who takes anti-inflammatory drugs home for her personal use.
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
Medical practitioners frequently make difficult decisions for patients and their families, including life-or-death ones.
They do it with the help of significant scientific training and more advanced equipment, but they also rely on their experience, instincts, and knowledge of specific patients.
The growing use of big data and predictive analytics in medical decision-making raises ethical concerns regarding big data in healthcare, particularly when data-driven judgments dehumanize people.
The term “big data” relates to the current era’s explosion of digital information.
Advances in data storage and processing technologies have transformed the speed and volume of data analysis capabilities, allowing predictive analytics to emerge.
Such analysis offers more accurate diagnostic and therapeutic assessments, but no matter how accurate, assessments based only on technology and data lack the necessary human touch.
Consider terminating treatment for a loved one’s terminal disease purely based on a prediction score generated by an algorithm.
As healthcare data gathering technology improves, the industry is confronted with challenges concerning how to handle data that is automatically collected.
Many current medical equipment are capable of providing a wide range of health data, whether or not the patient is aware of it.
Digital pills, often known as smart pills, are medications that include an ingestible sensor that transmits data when the tablet is swallowed.
In 2017, a version of the antipsychotic medicine aripiprazole (marketed as Abilify) became the first digital pill to be approved in the United States.
The patient’s stomach acid activates a digital sensor in the pills, which generates an electrical signal that is picked up by a patch on the rib cage and then communicated to a smartphone app.
The technology has the potential to help patients who have trouble adhering to their medications, but critics are concerned about who should have access to such information and how it can be protected.
The development of predictive and prescriptive algorithms capable of analyzing vast volumes of data has increased the privacy hazards associated with medical specimens that are preserved.
Medical researchers have always collected and kept blood and tissue samples for future research, but as genetics, genomics, and biotechnology have advanced, the value of biological samples has increased.
Reusing biological samples and data from previous research participants, as well as samples acquired from patients for clinical or diagnostic purposes, raises fresh questions concerning healthcare practitioners’ responsibilities to seek informed consent.
A patient may give a healthcare provider or clinical researcher permission to utilize a tissue sample for one test, but has no control over its use in future studies.
Considerations in Ethics
What is the most effective method for obtaining a patient’s informed permission to the use of predictive analytics and other sophisticated analysis techniques based on the patient’s personal data?
What are the ethical boundaries for using data obtained automatically by digital pills and other medical devices and technologies that report sensitive data without the patient’s knowledge?
Do present biospecimen policies and legislation provide patients with appropriate privacy protection?
When using population health data, patients’ privacy must be protected.
The digitization of patient data has numerous advantages.
EHRs allow for the creation of a centralized, shared record of a patient’s whole medical history, the automation of healthcare provider workflows, and the use of advanced medical evaluation tools.
They are vulnerable to privacy violations since they store enormous amounts of highly personal data.
Protecting patient data is a basic responsibility of healthcare practitioners, and the federal law prohibiting the publication of medical information carefully governs the management of sensitive patient health information, but issues of patient privacy are complicated by the field of population health.
The study of the health outcomes of large groups of individuals is known as population health.
In the era of big data, which may be used to uncover links between diseases and specific environments or socioeconomic groups, the use and efficacy of population health is expanding.
For example, population health can uncover widespread health issues or pinpoint areas of the population with a particularly high prevalence of a disease.
Sharing patient data for secondary uses, such as population health programs, necessitates either patient agreement or data anonymization.
Even anonymized data, though, can be abused.
De-anonymization, also known as data re-identification, is the process of comparing anonymous data with publicly available information and matching it to a specific person.
Insurance companies, lenders, marketers, landlords, and employers might potentially use the same data that public health professionals use to diagnose, treat, and promote public policy.
If population health data is utilized for goals other than promoting health, whether it is matched to an individual or applied in aggregate to a population, it has the potential to harm those who provided the data.
An investigation that uncovers a high prevalence of a disease in a particular demographic could be used to target education and treatment efforts, as well as change insurance coverage.
Considerations in Ethics
What safeguards could be put in place to prevent patient data from being de-anonymized?
How can patients be safeguarded from the detrimental consequences of algorithms that are biased while analyzing public health data?
What level of control should individual patients have over the use of their personal health data that is collected and stored in public databases?