THE HEALTH INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL IN EHEALTH:ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR AN INTERJURISTICAL SETTING

Abstract

Issues such as privacy, security, quality, etc. have received considerable attention in discussions of eHealth; however little attention has been paid to the fact that eHealth situates health information professionals (HIPs) in an ethical and legal context that differs importantly from that of traditional health care. In traditional health care HIP services are pragmatically useful but not inherently necessary; in eHealth, however, HIPs are not only the interface between physicians and patients but the instrumental facilitators of eHealth itself. With this, their professional standing acquires a fiduciary parameter it did not have before, and older models of the ethics of health information professionals are no longer wholly sufficient to provide guidance. Matters are complicated further by the inter-jurisdictional parameters of eHealth, which introduce dimensions that do not exist in the traditional intra-jurisdictional setting. This paper outlines the issues and sketches a possible approach for addressing the situation

Keywords

• eHealth, ethics, health information professionals

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