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Ethics and EHRs: What to consider

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, August 23, 2007

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Although electronic health records (EHRs) offer many benefits, they also raise moral concerns, especially regarding patient rights and privacy. So what are the top ethical challenges surrounding EHR implementation?

EHRs can change responsibilities related to patient care, and can have an effect on the way physicians, other clinicians, and patients interact with each other, depending on who has what kind of information and responsibility. Here are some of the top ethics challenges to watch for:

• Patient protection. Settle on the appropriate mechanism for individuals to decide whether to participate in a health records network (e.g., opt-in versus opt-out). Also amend existing policies and procedures to limit unnecessary disclosures of health information and the discriminatory use of health data. The patient, not the EHR, is priority.
• Job duties. EHRs are changing people's jobs. Some staff members must now perform more skilled work or take on more responsibility, sometimes without receiving adequate training or compensation. Others find that they now perform less skilled work and lose responsibility.
• Flexibility. Facilities must pay attention to how they address EHR issues, such as who will make the decisions and on what to base those decisions. Of course, this is different at every healthcare organization. To do the job well, you must create flexible EHR options that allow for different individuals' needs and ways of achieving balance between complex EHR issues and good healthcare.
• Time. EHRs require a great deal of effort and planning to make them work well as part of a national or international system. Although EHRs offer tremendous benefits, we should consider whether all the planning and effort to make them happen is the best use of healthcare resources.

To get more information, go to Electronic Health Records Briefing (EHRB). For the cost of just three stories, you can get the entire August issue of EHRB. Click here to choose between the PDF and HTML versions for just $30. Subscribers to the online version of EHRB have free access to this article. Subscribers to the print newsletter can find this article in their August issue.

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