Ethics principles and applications

Business Ethics

Defining Business Ethics and Examples in Health Care

Defining ethics must by nature be multifaceted in approach, as ethics serve as the foundation of philosophy, the basis for decision making, and the definition of strategies and tactics. Given how pervasive ethics can be from each of these three aspects alone, it is reasonable to define the foundation of ethics as a series of concepts, models, and theoretical structures that can be used for navigating personal and business decisions. Ethics also has its own schools of theories and thought, each defined according to the foundations of logic their founders have promoted and continued to refine over time. Ethics, morality and corporate social responsibility for many organizations are tightly interrelated, with ethics and morality being the foundations of how many healthcare organizations create and organize their own approach to institutional ethics and corporate integrity (Iltis, 2001).

Ethics Considerations in Healthcare

At the center of much of the debate over national healthcare is the ethicacy of insurance providers today and the levels of transparency they provide. Their authenticity and transparency, which is increasingly being defined through compliance legislation, is slowly having its intended effects of increasing auditability and therefore trust over the long-term (Goold, 1998). Traditionally however the ethics of healthcare insurance providers has been called into question and often used as the basis for continuing legislation to force even greater compliance.

The three most dominant aspects of healthcare insurance providers' ethical challenges today are first the preserving of patient confidentiality (Krishna, Kelleher, Stahlberg, 2007). This is critically important for patients and for their ability to continue to lead a life of their own choosing, based on keeping their medical histories confidential. The role of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was specifically enacted to provide a high level of confidentiality to patients throughout the U.S. (Krishna, Kelleher, Stahlberg, 2007). The second most critical ethical dilemma impacting healthcare insurance providers continues to be ratings of physicians and the assessment of their skill sets over time (Labig, 2009). As healthcare providers pay fees specifically on the performance levels of physicians their levels of performance need to be accurately and ethically assessed (Labig, 2009). The argument many patients have is that given the very high level of variation in performance of healthcare providers, often the premiums paid do not correspond to the level of service given. This is one of the arguments against nationalized healthcare as there are many who feel that provider quality will not be enforced and quality of care will suffer. The third most pressing ethical issue from a healthcare provider's standpoint is the reliance on metrics of performance, or balanced scorecards that can quantify the level of compliance over time for a given healthcare provider (Winkler, Gruen, Sussman, 2005). Today each insurance provider has yet to standardize on a common set of measures of their level of compliance to HIPAA legislation. This further leads to confusion over just how effective compliance initiatives are in turn across these three critical areas of ethical performance.