Describe the potential impacts of the pandemic on ethics and security as it applies to clinical practice after reviewing the article, “The COVID-19 Pandemic Highlights Shortcomings in US Health Care Informatics Infrastructure: A Call to Action. Be specific and provide examples.

COVID-19 impacted both ethics and security in clinical practice. O’Reilly-Shah et al. (2020) state the lack of interoperability, data sharing, and availability of standards in practice to facilitate both issues were highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interoperability can be addressed in practice by decreasing data silos, creating standards of data exchange, and increasing regulations requiring compatibility (O’Reilly-Shah et al., 2020). Through increased data sharing professionals can learn together in real-time and provide consistent equitable care using evidence-based practices developed from data. This can all be facilitated through a change in HIPPA (O’Reilly-Shah et al., 2020). EHR vendors will continue to profit from business as usual until systematic dysfunctions are addressed and healthcare systems implement and maintain high-quality security standards to abdicate the potential harms and risks associated with data sharing (O’Reilly-Shah et al., 2020).

References

American Nurses Association (2015a). Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretative Statements. https://www.nursingworld.org/coe-view-only

American Nurses Association. (2015b). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice (2nd ed.).

O’Reilly-Shah, V. N., Gentry, K. R., Van Cleve, W., Kendale, S. M., Jabaley, C. S., & Long, D. R. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic highlights shortcomings in US health care informatics infrastructure: A call to action. Anesthesia and Analgesia, 131(2), 340–344. https://doi.org/10.1213/ANE.0000000000004945

Sipes, C. (2020) Project management for the advanced practice nurse (2nd ed.). Springer Publishing