Question 1: What similarities and differences can you find between the codes of ethics of ACHE and MGMA-ACMPE?
Question 2: In the US health system, healthcare insurance is linked to employment. Using Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, argue for unlinking health insurance from employment.
Question 3: In 2013, reality-TV celebrity Kim Kardashian gave birth at a hospital in California. Six hospital employees-none of whom were responsible for Kardashian's care-had logged onto the hospital's electronic health record system to view Kardashian's personal and medical information (McCann 2013). Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, patients have the right to confidentiality. HIPAA requires providers to protect patients against "reasonably anticipated" disclosures of personal information.
Assume you are an intern in this hospital, assigned to help the hospital administrator investigating the Kardashian confidentiality breach. The administrator has asked you to propose a guideline or procedure that you think may help prevent future breaches in patient confidentiality. According to the ACHE Code of Ethics, what are the healthcare executive's responsibilities in the event of such a breach? What ideas will you propose for the guideline? How are your ideas supported by the ACHE Health Information Confidentiality policy statement?
Question 4: Based on what you learned in this chapter, explain how disclosure of unintended outcomes illustrates fiduciary duty. Why is disclosing an unintended outcome representative of the commitment to duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience?
Question 5: Propose an environmental or green assignment or project that could be integrated into your health administration class or curriculum.
Question 6: Compare the ACHE and ACHCA codes of ethics. Identify the ethical principles they share.
Question 7: Determine the quadrants for the following scenarios:
a. You are late to an important meeting at the community health center's corporate office. The route from your facility to the corporate office is congested and busy and has a posted speed limit of 45 miles per hour. Today, unfortunately, traffic is heavier than usual on the route because of road construction. To avoid the delay, you cut through a residential neighborhood on a side street. Although the posted speed there is 25 miles per hour, you drive through at 45 miles per hour because you are late. Into which quadrant does your action fall and why?
b. You are the administrator of a free clinic, and many of its patients are poor. A disposable diaper vendor approaches you about its community outreach program, which provides new babies with free diapers for two months. To participate, your clinic has to give the vendor two patients lists on an ongoing basis: (1) mothers who have had their first post-natal visit and (2) babies who have had their first newborn visit. The vendor will cross-reference the lists so that families are not contacted twice. To help out your clinic's poorest patients, you authorize the clinic staff to list only patients with Medicaid coverage. Into which quadrant does your action fall and why?
Question 8: The chapter proposes that the routine decision to maintain the confidentiality of an employee's performance evaluation contains an ethical element. Name three other routine managerial decisions or problems that you believe contain ethical elements. For each decision or problem, identify the associated ethical principle(s). Name one managerial problem that contains an ethical conflict. Identify the ethical principles involved.
Question 9: Review the steps of the ethical decision-making process. If you were a healthcare manager, which step do you believe would be the most difficult? Why? If you were a healthcare manager, which step do you believe determines the quality of your decision? Why?
Question 10: You receive a letter from the OHRP. The letter states that its team will be visiting your site on a compliance audit. What are your thoughts?