Ethics, Governance and Responsible Leadership Coursework Title: Name: Student Number: MSc Course:

 Introduction:

There may be an organisation or a firm that might collapse in this pandemic event. Many persons have been quarantined and diagnosed as covid19 positive during the current epidemic, which means that the health care insurance company will have to pay a lot of money to cover the costs associated with it. If their fund is not adequate to meet the all health claims from their cardholders, then they may collapse or go bankrupt as a result of their cardholders' usage of the card towards hospital expenditures (Stumpf, 2005). Insurance companies may impose limits on covid 19 patients by classifying them into moderate, serious, and severe cases in order to determine the range of coverage amounts and by raising premiums by at least 10% in order to fund claims from policyholders in order to address these issues. Another approach is to promote the acquisition of a health card in order to raise more money for health insurance claims. In addition, the organisation may be extra stringent when it comes to applicants with pre-existing medical issues. Because of the current pandemic, health card insurance companies may be considered one of the more dangerous businesses today, but a well-thought-out plan will help the business hold its own.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS

In the past, medical records were kept on paper as research, clinical, administrative, and financial reasons, but this practise has been replaced by electronic records. Its main flaw was that it could only be used by a single person at a time, which limited its usefulness. It took anything from a few weeks to a few months longer to finish since it had to be updated manually.

A patient's well-being remains the driving force behind the use of electronic media to record patient care. The use of electronic health records (EHRs) has several benefits over the use of paper records. Many of the issues associated with incorrect prescriptions, dosages, and procedures are alleviated when clear records are kept. Moreover, when EHRs are linked to drug banks & pharmacies, adverse medication responses may be minimized significantly. Drugs that have been shown to have an unfavorable response in one patient may be prevented from being prescribed and ordered (Stumpf, 2005). The convenience of being able to use the service from any location at any time is also advantageous. You may keep them for a longer period of time since they take up less room. They decrease the amount of records lost, aid in research, provide for a low-cost backup set of all records, speed up data transmission, and are cost-effective in all of these respects as well. The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has been found to increase patient compliance, enable quality assurance and minimise medical mistakes.

According to the National Coordinator Technology (IT), a patient's medical record is "not simply a collection or data that you are preserving, it is life." The information included in the patient's file belongs to the patient. The physical medical record is owned by the physician as well as the organization. Confidentiality and privacy, security breaches, implementation, and data mistakes are four of the most important ethical concerns for electronic health records (EHRs).

PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY

This "right to be left alone" was defined by Samuel Dennis Warren and Louis Brandeis. Alternatively, Richard Rognehaugh explains privacy as a person's right to keep their personal information private; the claim of people to be left alone, without monitoring or intervention by other individuals, organisations or the government. With only the patient's consent or as permitted by law may personal information about a patient be made available to others. The defense lawyer or guardian of a patient should make choices concerning information sharing where the patient would be unable to do so due to age or mental disability. Confidential information exchanged in the course of a therapeutic encounter must be safeguarded. A government hospital's overall number of patients with breast carcinoma is not included in this category since the patient's identity cannot be determined from the data.

If EHRs are to work as intended, they will need the availability of patient data to third parties like insurance companies and healthcare providers. The best way to maintain data privacy is to restrict access to those those who need it. Authorizing users is the first step in this process. Based on pre-established rights, the user's access is granted. The administrator is in charge of assigning usernames and passwords, as well as determining the scope of the information that may be shared. When viewing information, the users must be aware that they'll be held responsible for its use or abuse. There is nothing stopping them from doing their duties since they have access to the data they need. Because of this, enforcing medical record security requires giving user rights.

Although restricting access to health is critical, it is not enough to ensure confidentiality. Strong confidentiality and security rules are needed to protect patient information.

SECURITY BREACHES

Confidential health information may be compromised if it is shared with others without the individual's permission or authority. Howard University Hospital in Washington, DC recently had two breaches of insufficient data security, both of which affected substantial numbers of patients. An employee at the hospital has been accused of breaking the Information Portability And accountability Act (HIPAA) on May 14, 2013. (HIPAA). They stated Laurie Napper sold patients' personal information for 17 months by using her position at the hospital as an intermediary between patients and other parties that wanted their data. It had been scheduled for June 12, 2013, when she would be sentenced to six months in a half-way home and be fined $2,000 for the crime she had committed. More than 34,000 people had their medical records hacked by the same institution only a few weeks before. The data of a patient were copied onto a laptop belonging to a hospital contractor, which was taken from his vehicle. Since the information was just password secured and not encrypted, anybody with the correct password might have access the patient records without a secret key that was produced at random. Encryption is the process of encoding data in such a manner that it can only be decoded by those with the proper credentials. 

The encryption key indicates how the data should be decrypted, which is typically how it is done. That information included people's names and addresses as well as their Social Security numbers in certain circumstances, according to a hospital news statement. Earlier this year, Prime Health care Services Inc. agreed to pay $275,000 to resolve an inquiry into allegations of privacy violations at one of its hospitals. Doctors, public health authorities, and federal regulators are only starting to grasp the difficulty of securing medical information. In order to safeguard portable EHRs, health care providers may use precautions such as cloud storage, password security, and encryption. Seventy-three percent of doctors admit to exchanging work-related text messages with their colleagues. Unlike desktop computers, mobile devices are not meant to be managed centrally by a single IT department. You never know where your mobile gadget will end up. When transmitting sensitive information, mobile devices should be encrypted. Password security and encryption may be used to keep portable EHRs safe. EHRs may be protected by using a two-factor authentication scheme that includes a password and a security token.

To ensure the integrity of data, security measures including such firewalls, antivirus, and intrusion prevention software must be implemented. Patients' privacy and confidentiality are protected by a variety of rules and procedures. Employees, for example, must not exchange their IDs, log out when they leave a terminal, and use their own IDs to access customer digital information. It is essential that a business select a security officer to collaborate with a team of health IT professionals.

Random audits should be conducted on a regular basis to ensure compliance with hospital rules. Any system action has a corresponding audit trail. Date and time stamps are included, as well as information about the content, duration and author. It is possible that the system will keep track of who accessed a patient's medical records without permission, as well as the date and time, screens viewed, and how much time was spent doing so (Luque, 2014).  When it comes to determining whether an access was inadvertent or planned, this information may be quite useful. Companies are required by the Security Rule to maintain an audit record of information system activity.

The use of third-party services raises unique concerns about security and confidentiality of personal information. Employee-only access to a EMR necessitates that any external vendor be authorised and monitored by an employee to access and traverse the record..

Patients' rights and dignity are respected, and health care organisations are required to take on societal responsibilities such as improving public health. They are also obliged to ensure the safety of their patients. The ethics, integrity, and civic conscience of health care institutions have been the subject of a growing number of ethical scandals and moral controversies. There has been a growing focus on the ethical conduct of corporations across all sectors and branches of the economy (Brown and Trevio, 2006; Kalshoven et al., 2011). In order to foster an environment of mutual respect, honesty, and equity, leaders must practise ethical leadership (Mendonca and Kanungo, 2007). Employees are paying extra attention to leaders because of their positions of power and prominence in the organization's structure (Neubert et al., 2009). Having legal authority, control over resources, and accountability, they may impact both the ethical environment of the company and the individual actions of its employees.

A separate leadership concept known as ethical leadership has emerged by this decade's dawn. An ethical leader "demonstrates normatively suitable behaviour via personal acts and interpersonal connections and promotes such conduct to followers through two-way interaction, reinforcement and decision-making," according to the definition provided by Mendenhall, (2018).The moral manager and the moral individual are both included in this concept of ethical leadership. Moral person is a term used to describe a leader's personal characteristics, as well as their actions. To put it another way: Ethical leaders are defined as exceptional role models who are selfless, altruistic, trustworthy, and fair. They demonstrate genuine concern and support for his subordinates, as well as caring for their greater community. According to moral manager dimensions second, leaders are responsible for moulding others' behaviours (Scherer,  2012).  People look to ethical leaders for guidance and inspiration. As a result, they actively demonstrate ethical conduct and urge their subordinates to do the same by articulating clear ethical norms and beliefs. In addition, they use a reward system to guide good and bad behaviour to enforce predicted behaviours.

There are a number of other leadership theories that take an ethical approach to leadership, such as transformative, genuine, and servant leadership. Characteristics and actions of a moral person are referenced in these philosophies of leadership (Voegtlin, 2011).  The ethical leadership method differs from other comparable ideas in that it emphasises leaders' proactive effect on followers' ethical behaviour. Explanatory and transactional methods used by ethical leaders help subordinates to understand and implement the value of etiquette, as well as to punish and reward unethical conduct among their peers.

Leaders who consistently exhibit morally acceptable conduct may have good consequences on many individual and organisational outcomes, according to empirical study (Lawton and Paez, 2015). There is a favourable correlation between followers' impressions and attitudes such as how satisfied they are, how much they trust management and how much they are committed to the company (Mayer, 2014).  Ethical leadership has a good effect on workers' views, but the underlying processes, particularly the intervening factors that are still under investigation.

This study intends to make two contributions to the literature on ethical leadership. Ethical leadership in healthcare coverage is an essential concept, and this research aims to give empirical proof of this influence by examining its link with three significant employee work perceptions: job satisfaction, emotional commitment, and burnout (Davoudi, 2019).  A follower-centered approach is used to investigate the influence of two employees’ psychological resources: anger tolerance and emotional stability. These personal resources have not yet been studied in connection to leadership and employee work attitudes, as far as authors' knowledge goes. Only a few studies have looked at the effect of ethical leadership style on employee attitudes in healthcare settings. Researchers have shown an association between ethical leadership with nurses' sense of belonging to their organisations their level of dedication to their workplaces and their overall performance (Voegtlin, 2011).  A research in a German private health care firm found that ethical leadership had a beneficial influence on job satisfaction, which was mitigated by the emotional support provided by co-workers. Another research including doctors found that ethical leadership had a positive impact on emotional weariness, which is one of the most common symptoms of burnout.

References:

Doh, J. P., & Stumpf, S. A. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook on responsible leadership and governance in global business. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Doh, J. P., & Stumpf, S. A. (2005). Towards a framework of responsible leadership and governance. Handbook on responsible leadership and governance in global business, 3-18.

Doh, J. P., Stumpf, S. A., & Tymon, W. G. (2011). Responsible leadership helps retain talent in India. In Responsible leadership (pp. 85-100). Springer, Dordrecht.

Stahl, G. K., & Sully de Luque, M. (2014). Antecedents of responsible leader behavior: A research synthesis, conceptual framework, and agenda for future research. Academy of Management Perspectives, 28(3), 235-254.

Miska, C., & Mendenhall, M. E. (2018). Responsible leadership: A mapping of extant research and future directions. Journal of Business Ethics, 148(1), 117-134.

Voegtlin, C., Patzer, M., & Scherer, A. G. (2012). Responsible leadership in global business: A new approach to leadership and its multi-level outcomes. Journal of business ethics, 105(1), 1-16.

Voegtlin, C. (2011). Development of a scale measuring discursive responsible leadership. In Responsible leadership (pp. 57-73). Springer, Dordrecht.

Miska, C., Hilbe, C., & Mayer, S. (2014). Reconciling different views on responsible leadership: A rationality-based approach. Journal of Business Ethics, 125(2), 349-360.

Taştan, S. B., & Davoudi, S. M. M. (2019). The relationship between socially responsible leadership and organisational ethical climate: in search for the role of leader's relational transparency. International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, 13(3), 275-299.

Voegtlin, C. (2011). Development of a scale measuring discursive responsible leadership. In Responsible leadership (pp. 57-73). Springer, Dordrecht.