Hospital
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Hospital Terminates Employees for Allowing Another To Do Their Jobs
A Boston hospital recently announced that it terminated two employees over a privacy breach after an investigation determined that they allowed a third person, not an employee of the hospital, to perform some of their job duties. That person might have accessed patient protected health information, the hospital said.
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Unique Identifier Rule Can Be Confusing
HIPAA’s Unique Identifier Rule mandates the use of standardized codes to provide unique identification of healthcare organizations, employees, and patients in an effort to enhance efficiency and security. The requirements and use of the codes can be confusing.
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Respond to HIPAA Complaints with Planned Process
Healthcare organizations should have a formal process in place for responding to HIPAA complaints to avoid having significant problems slip through the cracks and possibly result in penalties.
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Anesthesiologists Encounter Unique Ethical Issues
There currently is no standardized ethics curriculum for anesthesiology training programs in the United States. Thus, the ethics education trainees receive varies depending on the institution.
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Physicians Posting About Devices May Have Undisclosed Financial Conflicts
Most physicians who mention specific devices or companies in social media posts have undisclosed financial conflicts, a recent study found.
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Physicians May Have Ethical Obligation to Inform Patients if AI Tool Is Used
Did a physician factor in the recommendations of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool when ruling out a diagnosis or deciding whether to order a diagnostic test? If so, the clinician may wonder whether there is an ethical obligation to tell the patient.
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Ethical Approaches to Obtain High-Quality Crowdsourced Data
Researchers increasingly are using online recruitment (“crowdsourcing”) for studies. Rather than relying on undergraduate panels, such as college freshmen completing studies for credit, or basic convenience sampling using social media posts or flyers in classrooms, platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific allow researchers to post their studies as “jobs” for online workers to complete.
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QI Initiative Increases Goals of Care Conversations
Many hospitalized patients lack goals of care conversations, causing ethical conflicts at the end of life.
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Ethical Concerns with Portable MRIs in Research
New portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies are being developed, allowing study investigators to conduct field-based research in remote settings. The introduction of portable MRI technologies means that new users, some with less experience with MRI research, are using MRI in new locations. There also is increased variation in image resolution. All those factors raise concerns about researchers’ ability to maintain quality control.
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Ethicists Are Addressing Ableism in Medical Education, Clinical Practice
There is increasing attention to the issue of ableism in healthcare. One concern is that medical education is not doing enough to include the perspectives of people with disabilities.