Importance of Patient Privacy to Health Care Ethics

Importance of Patient Privacy to Health Care Ethics
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Health Care Ethics: Patient Privacy
Introduction
Patient privacy is one of the most important topics in health care ethics particularly due to the rapid advancement of technology that has been adopted in the health care sector. In the wake of technologies such as electronic health records (EHR), patients’ medical histories are recorded, stored, and often shared. The issue of patient privacy raises key health care ethics issues: confidentiality and consent. These are two basic health care principles that all the stakeholders in the sector have to observe. The New York Times is a popular newspaper that has covered numerous articles surrounding patient privacy. This paper evaluates how patient privacy has been reported in this popular media.
Importance of Patient Privacy to Health Care Ethics
Patient privacy is extremely important to health care ethics primarily because it directly affects confidentiality and consent. It is important to recognize that maintaining confidentiality is one of the basic principles of health care ethics. Therefore, key health care stakeholders such as nurses and physicians have the role of ensuring that they protect the confidentiality of patients. In a study by Beltran-Aroca et al. (2016), it was determined that a patient confidentiality breach occurred every 62.5 hours. Such a high incidence of breaches of confidentiality undermines to a great extent the essential trust between patients and health professionals. Given the significant importance of maintaining the confidentiality of patient information, the issue of patient privacy is crucial in health care ethics.
Patient privacy also touches on the issue of consent that is quite significant in health care ethics. Consent, in this case, does not revolve around voluntary decision to undergo a procedure or information disclosure but giving informed consent to providers to allow accessing and sharing of information through electronic health information exchange (eHIE). In this case, meaningful consent occurs only when the patient makes an informed decision and is also recorded (HealthIT.gov, 2018). Given that patient privacy covers informed consent on sharing personal information, the topic is quite relevant to health care ethics.
The topic is also relevant because of technological advancement in healthcare that records numerous pieces of personal information. Given that technology use is inevitable in the delivery of health care services, the issue of patient privacy becomes relevant. This is also because patient information can be sought after by hackers and third-party organizations that seek to use it to meet their interests.
How Patient Privacy Has Been Reported
The New York Times has covered the issue of patient privacy extensively, and it is has been reported in several ways. One of the issues covered revolving around patient privacy legislation. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the legislation most covered by the articles revolving around patient privacy. One piece is even entirely dedicated to educating the reader about HIPAA and how it works. The article by Kavi (2021) sought to clear the confusion Americans have surrounding the law after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene falsely claimed that disclosing one’s vaccination status violates one’s HIPAA rights. The article reports widely about the perpetuation of misinformation about the law. Another article in the publication reports how new data ruled by the Trump administration would empower patients while risking their privacy. Therefore, the issue of patient privacy has been reported mainly from the frame of data regulations. There seems to be a divide on whether or not patient data should be easily shared and exchanged among different health care professionals and organizations. While one side of the debate considers sharing personal information valuable in advancing the field, another side considers it risky as it exposes patient information to third-party entities.
Patient privacy has also been reported in the form of opinions of experts in the field of technology. The majority of the opinions on the issue of patient privacy recommend that patients give up their information for the greater good. For example, the article by Frank (2019) reports how anonymized health data can advance the diagnosis and treatment of many illnesses through the use of machine learning. In another article by Miner (2019), the author explains that privacy protections are barriers to AI programs that could improve the diagnosis of cancers and the screening of genetic disorders. On the other hand, Deming (2021) reports that there have been numerous calls for stricter laws to protect the privacy of individuals. Therefore, it appears that on the one hand, some experts perceive the current privacy protection laws to be a stumbling block, while others are calling for even stricter regulation. While the former argue that data anonymization could help protect patients’ privacy, the latter group provides evidence of how data re-identification could still comprise that privacy.
Contribution to Understanding of Health Care Ethics
Many media reports on patient privacy contributed significantly to the understanding of health care ethics. First, the reports have covered extensively the rules protecting patient privacy and, specificall...