Ethical Self-Assessment
The role of ethics in healthcare is to mitigate risks and ensure oversight of each strategic process area, ensuring patient treatment quality consistency and transparency. The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Code of Ethics and its self-assessment provide foundational insights into how ethical decisions can be more effectively made and how decision making can align effectively to the ACHE standards. Ethics are the foundation of patient trust and need to be the catalyst of transparency throughout a healthcare provider organization to the practice level and ultimately solidifying patient and healthcare provider collaboration to common goals (Higgins, Gross, Hackett, 2000). In the highest-performing healthcare providers, there is a tight alignment of patient expectations and the need for transparency on the one hand, and the ethics and willingness of a healthcare provider to disclose data and knowledge necessary to keep treatment plans progressing (Frederick, Wasieleski, Weber, 2000). In addition to the ethical requirements of healthcare providers to share information, intelligence, insights and knowledge, there is the moral imperative of guiding patients to the best possible treatment programs and redefining treatment workflows as needed (Weil, Kimball, Lerner, 2010).
Ethical Decision Making: Lessons From Self-Assessments
The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) self-assessment provided insightful analysis of leadership and the many facets of relationships that healthcare professionals need to manage well to succeed in delivering exceptional service (Higgins, Gross, Hackett, 2000). These facets of relationships included community, patients and their families, boards, colleagues and staff, clinicians, and buyers, payors and suppliers. After having completed this self-assessment the following observations were made.
First, leadership along the dimensions of ethical behavior and guidance as defined by the ACHE Self-Assessment are very difficult o maintain over a long period of time without having...
This is corroborated with studies of ethical leadership as defined within empirical studies showing the value of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in keeping ethical values and decision making as a core attribute in a healthcare provider culture (Weil, Kimball, Lerner, 2010). Also evident is that transformational leadership that seeks to motivate entire healthcare provider staffs to become and stay committed to ethical behavior and decision making is more dependent on the ability to persuade and the attributes of charismatic leadership and EI combined as part of a leadership strategy (Higgins, Gross, Hackett, 2000).
Second, ethicacy across communities, both within and outside a healthcare provider organization, is an iterative process that must have both qualitative and quantitative aspects to succeed. This is also supported by empirical studies showing the innate value of concentrating on both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of ethical compliance and best practices attainment (Frederick, Wasieleski, Weber, 2000). The community questions specifically in the areas of patients and their families, colleagues and staff and clinicians show the need for continual attention of authenticity and transparency so trust can be created and maintained over time. The quantification of trust, which has been a focus of researchers in how ethics could be made part of balanced scorecards and analytics measuring performance, have defied ease of measurement however (Weil, Kimball, Lerner, 2010). Instead the focus has been in defining policies and processes for ethical compliance, yet many of these approaches have lacked the agility to respond to changing healthcare provider requirements (Weil, Kimball, Lerner, 2010). In completing the ACHE Self-Assessment is clear there is room for innovation and improvement in how healthcare providers interpret and act on the data provided, even on an individual basis. It is a reasonable conclusion to see how the aggregation of responses ot the ACHE Self-Assessment could be made a benchmark across an entire…
