Stratford HIM Professional Decision Making & Business Ethics Replies Discussion 1: Discuss the ethical implications surrounding the HIM professional’s dec

Stratford HIM Professional Decision Making & Business Ethics Replies Discussion 1:

Discuss the ethical implications surrounding the HIM professional’s decision-making in the given scenario above…

This scenario is a human resource department problem at the get go. It is the HR who manages applications, hiring, and orientation processes. Passing it onto the HIM professional as a “It is not my problem anymore” is very irresponsible. However, assuming that the HR department was a part of the transition as well, that included a major turnover, it is now the HIM professional’s job to make sure that the employee gets adequate training.

The HIM professional needs to engage justice, fairness, caring, and compassion as parts of moral awareness when it comes to decision making and diversity management. “The right people, technology, and structure are the elements that support a high performing organization”1. It is the manager’s responsibility to be fair to the employee by giving the employee a chance to prove himself/herself. This is not possible since the employee was not given the equal benefit of certain orientation trainings. Therefore, equal opportunities, recruitment, selection, promotion and education should also apply to the employee.

Knowing the existence of the lack of diversity (e.g. race, gender, socioeconomic background) in the department, it is the HIM professional’s job to “understand that he/she has a responsibility to others and this responsibility includes not hurting others”1. By dismissing the employees’ lack of training, the HIM is potentially endangering the employee, and potentially eliciting negative work behaviors from others, which can affect the workplace’s productivity overall. The HIM professional should follow through with the training to meet the milestones, extend the required 90 days, and complete reassessment once training is done. It is unfortunate that the transition happened concurrently with the hiring process, and it seems the lack of training was due to management issues that come with the transition, but it was not the employee’s fault that he/she was not fully trained, so he/she should not be responsible for anything he/she does not know.

Compare and contrast business ethics with how you perceive clinical/medical ethics.

Business ethics is the “study of a society’s moral standards as they are applied to the activities and relationships created by business transactions”2. Key ethical values for businesses are fairness, integrity, trust and responsibility to the community. Clinical/medical ethics, on the other hand, revolves around the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. While clinical ethics revolve around the patient, business ethics revolves on customers/consumer along with employees, business partners (suppliers, contractors), and superiors. Clinical ethics focuses, and is measured by the success of the outcome of the patient. Business ethics are measured through profits.

Despite these differences, business ethics have their own version of the principles of medical ethics. Justice is fairness in business. Maleficence can be translated to due care, which is the obligation to “ensure that the customer’s interests are not harmed by the products or services offered” 2. Beneficence can be the transparency in advertisements that does not provide misleading information and falsehoods. Lastly, businesses’ version of autonomy is that customers/buyers has a right to expect the products and services they buy, live up to the promises made by the sellers. In both cases, the customer relies on the expertise of the seller, while the patient relies on the medical provider.

1. Flite CA, Johns ML. Chapter 22: Management and leadership. In Laurinda Beebe Harman and Frances H. Cornelius. Ethical Challenges in the Management of Health Information, 3rd Edition (p.569,573). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. 2017.

2. Gardenier M, Olenik K. Chapter 23: Entrepreneurship. In Laurinda Beebe Harman and Frances H. Cornelius. Ethical Challenges in the Management of Health Information, 3rd Edition (p.610-611). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. 2017.

Discussion 2:

HIM ’s professional values include education and technical capabilities, patient safety, data validity and accuracy, authenticity, compassion, and performance dedicated to providing quality services in professional roles. The decision-making criteria for work decision-making may include technical feasibility, reasonable consideration of the conflicts of interest, obligations, and values of others involved in the decision-making, and moral decision-making is what should be done. The standard requires professionals to consider values other than individuals, and consider the values and perspectives of other participants. 1 The core moral principles of autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence are important to the code of ethics. The first step in moral awareness is moral decision making. Moral awareness is the ability to identify a situation that has moral implications.2 When facing employee issues in our discussions. I think it is reasonable that the probation period is different from the treatment of the hired personnel. Because during the probation period, we still check whether all aspects of them can meet the requirements of HIM professionals.
American medical ethics strongly emphasizes that patient autonomy is its universal value. It emphasizes the moral ability of individuals by emphasizing autonomous choice. This autonomous choice is a means to avoid recognizing a specific value system in a diverse society. In the discussion of medical ethics justice, it is usually considered to give all patients a minimum of care. Commercially managed care plans avoid the social problem of only distributing medical services. In medicine, the supremacy of ethical behavior is fundamental, although sometimes ethical behavior is sometimes violated. In business, some people think that morality is a non-primary social commodity and must compete with other social commodities in the business field. 3 Medical ethics deals with personal moral dilemmas in modern medical practice, while business ethics focuses on how companies treat ethics Integrate academic perspectives into business practice.

References:

1 Code of Ethics: Principles for Ethical Leadership. Perspectives in Health Information Management. http://bok.ahima.org/doc?oid=301231#.XqScBZNKj6Y. Accessed April 25, 2020.

2 Harman LB, Cornelius FH, eds. Ethical Health Informatics: Challenges and Opportunities. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning; 201

3 Eiser AR, Dorr Goold S, Suchman AL. The role of bioethics and business ethics. Journal of general internal medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1496872/. Published January 1999. Accessed April 25, 2020.

Discussion 3:

Question1:

Your organization sets a target that could be an impossible, perhaps inaccessible monthly sales or production number of goods. Though not ethical some workers and even some of their members are motivated to achieve a target that might create an ethical red flag through their leadership with ambitious organization objectives. Unrealistic goals can enable managers to put undue pressure on their employees and staff should consider the elimination of corners or breach of ethical or legal issues. Ethical corners are a shortcut rarely feasible, because if the whole organization or group struggles to meet its targets, business leadership requires input to re-evaluate the objectives and performance goals. It is one thing have a personal dispute with manager and another to report a man who behaves unethically. This can be evident, as in the case of manipulating numbers in a survey or wasting resources on unsuitable activities; however, it can be even subtler in the sense of coercion, receiving inappropriate manufacturer gifts, or asking you to miss a routine protocol once. Studies finding that managers pay for 60% of the violence in the workplace make manipulation of the leadership undesirable.

Bibliography:

1. 5 Common Ethical Issues in the Workplace. Strategic Leadership and Management. 2019. Accessed from https://www.michiganstateuniversityonline.com/resources/leadership/common-ethical-issues-in-the-workplace/

Question2:

Potential differences between patient and organizational views need new ethical guidelines and strategies for healthcare institutions that resolve patients, practitioners, and organization’s triadic relation. The conventional field of bioethics is the link between patients and clinicians. Recent bioethics theories have followed contemporary developments in political theory in terms in self-determination and individual’s rights, based on the ancient Hippocratic tradition of justice and welfare. Business ethics rather concentrated on the interaction between the company and the way it creates products and services for its clients. 1 In many cases it is more sophisticated to develop medical ethics and business ethics than engineering ethics and significant conclusions can be taken from these two dimensions. The pressure on the patient harmed by the actions of the doctor and the physician’s explicit personal responsibility are two prominent importance in medical ethics. A tendency for the employees to constrict their own personal ethical standards at work and the employees’ related pattern to restrict their ethical standards to an acceptable level of consistency, that may not be high and not strive to the highest achievable levels, are two important lessons gained from business ethics. 2

Bibliography:

Eiser AR, Dorr Goold S, Suchman AL. The role of bioethics and business ethics. J Gen Intern Med. 1999;14(Suppl 1):S58–S62. doi:10.1046/j.1525-1497.1999.00264.x
Ethics in Medicine and Business. Engineering Ethics. 2009. doi: 10.1007/978-1-84882-224-5_4.

Discussion 4:

Discuss the ethical implications surrounding the HIM professional’s decision-making when confronted with a minority employee in a department with limited diversity who has failed to meet certain 90-day employment milestones knowing that the employee was not given equal benefit of certain orientation trainings due a change in management that remained in transition during the employee’s hire and probationary period.

There are several different aspects to take when considering the ethical implications of this situation. The main one, in my opinion; using moral awareness and considering the fact that the employee was hired amidst a serious change in management, we can reason that this “delinquency” has arisen due to the absence of guidance and management since no orientation was available. But taking a more serious ethical analysis, another perspective that could be taken is that, due to the low-diversity of this department, the staff was not inclusive enough to provide care to the new employee amidst the turbulent situation. As stated in our main reading, diversity can produce better decision making in the work environment1. If this was the case, it is possible that the new hire could have remained on track if the department was originally more diverse. Also, considering that the principle of equal opportunity is grounded in ethics, this workers lack of opportunity reflects an ethical dilemma. We must also consider the diversity management principles of virtue ethics and ethics of care. Considering role theory, which is partnered with virtue ethics, my prior statements might not be completely correct. Role theory in this setting suggests that the lack of implied racial diversity in the department could be instead filled by people with diverse virtues. Considering these things, a HIM professional approaching this situation should use the principles of ethics of care to heal this situation. As our reading tells us, ethics of care is used to empower and grow others through the use of responsiveness and inclusivity1.

Compare and contrast business ethics with how you perceive clinical/medical ethics.

Business ethics primarily focuses on the morality of business transactions, something that is tied to some human interaction but at the same time abstracted from it. When considering business it is money, profit, commerce, etc that is considered first and not the human element that drives it. It is important to understand that element because money heavily influences a person’s well-being. So, it is important that such business elements like contracts and advertisements are ethically considered so to not mislead. This is why many business institutions consider business ethic principles to include fairness, respect, integrity, accountability, etc2. Biomedical ethics are similar to business ethics in this way, but are different in that they do not consider a person first.

Laurinda Beebe Harman and Frances H. Cornelius. Ethical Challenges in the Management of Health Information, 3rd Edition (p.567-596). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. 2017.
Ethical Principles for Business. (2017, July 14). Retrieved from https://www.southuniversity.edu/news-and-blogs/201…