Meghan is the owner/operator of an enterprise that scans documents for local bus
ID: 387813 • Letter: M
Question
Meghan is the owner/operator of an enterprise that scans documents for local businesses. Before importing the documents onto a computer disk (CD), Meghan manually scans in each page of the documents. If there is an issue with any of the documents received from a business (e.g., the paper is damaged and will not scan properly), she photocopies the damaged original before tossing it and uses the copy in its place. In partnership with a nearby senior high school, Meghan has employed 10 eleventh-graders to assist her with the task of scanning documents. And, miraculously, Meghan wins a contract with Houston Independent Health to scan old medical records onto CDs. Houston Independent Health rapidly delivers 500 boxes of patient files to Meghan’s place of business for immediate processing. With urgency and without any further discussion or training, the student workers embark upon the assigned task of scanning the medical records of Houston Independent Health’s former patients. Using the attached Ethical Decision-Making Model, respond in detail to the following questions, meeting the assigned APA writing-style guidelines. This submission should be five to seven pages, not including the title page and list of references. Cite the sources of the data used to formulate this submission.
a.Analyze the scenario and determine if there is a problem.
b.Are any ethical issues present?
c.Which ethical principles might guide you in the analysis of this scenario?
d.Provide three alternate methods that will make Meghan’s business HIPAA compliant.
e.List any concerns or possible consequences for the alternate methods that you propose to Meghan
Explanation / Answer
a.
In the present question, Meghan who's in the business of scanning is getting her work done with the help of the students who are doing it for part time.
But same time, nothing is specified as to the training method or the steps he asked or brief the students to undertake before copying or scanning same.
As mentioned, the method which she employs of copying first in order to ensure that the page is not damage and the same can be print out perfectly is quite a long process and efforts taking although this also protect the harm that may occur if the same is not followed.
But as the fact that she doesn’t explain her students the same method, it is problem.
Also, she has not created any guidelines mentioning the Performa and to do task for those students. Hospitals contains the confidential matters and documents that are not supposed to be leak out without their consent and sometimes without the court orders or police intervene.
What if the students leak out? What if the student's mis use it? What if someone out the agency, bribe the students for getting the information.
If not Meghan, at least the hospital makes sure and should have done proper verification before handing over the documents to her.
Also, there is no back up for those CD which is to be handover to the hospital at later stage.
b.
Yes, whenever you take the responsibility of anything from your client and is getting paid, you have to make sure of the quality of work assigned, secrecy of the matter and confidentiality of the documents.
Here, the persons who are hired for getting the documents scanned were not verified and neither they provided any training, nor any discussion happened with them before asking them to work. Since no decorum and TO-DO list or responsibility is officially assigned to them, they are free to work as they want. There is no written agreement or discussion as to save the data security or protect the confidentially of the documents shared.
The students can leak the information, or they may just skip some important content or paper for scanning that out. How are they making sure that all the page is scanned, or all the pages are correctly scanned? There is no such oversight of their work. This may rather result in unethical practises.
c. Following ethical principles such as-
Trust – Hospital while delegating this huge process has trusted Meghan for their quality of work. However, here trust is neglected under the mentioned circumstances.
Respect – respect towards work and the client is highly appreciable if followed.
Accountability – Meghan would be accountable for her job, if anything wrong happen even by the students, she will be held responsible being the principal.
Fairness – Fairness and integrity of the work is highly important.
Responsibility – Responsibility of the work undertaken infect wins from other vendors.
Commitment to excellence – Whenever you take somebody work's you need to make sure that you do with 100% correction and quality. Commitment towards the client work is a survival.
d.
HIPAA will help the Meghan to protect the data from unauthorised access either by the employees or by leaking of the information in order to make sure of data security and protection.
There are three different ways to comply with HIPPA –