The electronic health record: ethical considerations

Cover -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1 - The nature of electronic health records -- Introduction -- Health and records in the realm of health care -- Health records themselves -- Signs, data, information, and logical spaces -- Signs -- Understood causally -- Understood conventionally -- Signs and data -- Data-space and information-space -- Diagnosis as tracing a path through information-space -- Decision-space -- EHRs and patient analogues -- Patient profiles -- Patients, EHRs, and isomorphs -- Paper-based records, EHRs, and patient analogues -- Patients and EHRs -- Some implications -- Chapter 2 - From ethical principles to information ethics -- Introduction -- Ethical principles in general -- Legitimacy -- Binding force -- Consistency -- Derivation -- Ethics and EHRs -- When is the treatment of something appropriate? -- What constitutes ethically appropriate treatment? -- Definitions of "ethics" -- Religiously based ethics -- Social consensus-based ethics -- Legally based ethics -- Tradition-based ethics -- Philosophically based ethics -- Ethics as framework -- Persons -- Rights and duties -- The principles of ethics -- Principle of Autonomy -- Principle of Equality -- Principle of Impossibility -- Principle of Integrity -- Principle of Beneficence -- Principle of Non-Malfeasance -- Principles of information ethics -- Principle of Information Privacy and Disposition -- Principle of Openness -- Principle of Access -- Principle of Security -- Principle of Legitimate Infringement -- Principle of the Least Intrusive Alternative -- Principle of Accountability -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3 - Ownership, privacy, and related issues -- Introduction -- Ownership -- Patient data and patient profiles -- EHRs, patient profiles, and appropriation of personality -- Privacy -- Some conditions and limitations.

The Electronic Health Record: Ethical Considerations analyses the ethical issues that surround the construction, maintenance, storage, use, linkage, manipulation and communication of electronic health records. Its purpose is to provide ethical guidance to formulate and implement policies at the local, national and global level, and to provide the basis for global certification in health information ethics. Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly replacing the use of paper-based records in the delivery of health care. They are integral to providing eHealth, telehealth, mHealth and pHealth - all of which are increasingly replacing direct and personal physician-patient interaction - as well as in the developing field of artificial intelligence and expert systems in health care. The book supplements considerations that are raised by national and international regulations dealing with electronic records in general, for instance the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union. This book is a valuable resource for physicians, health care administrators and workers, IT service providers and several members of biomedical field who are interested in learning more about how to ethically manage health data