Technology in healthcare has advanced communication between patients and clinicians, but this raises ethical issues. Concerns around patient privacy, the ability to convey emotions virtually, and increased workload and liability for clinicians have discouraged adoption of patient-clinician messaging. Ensuring patient privacy legally through HIPAA can be difficult online where identity is hard to verify. However, secure patient accounts and video chatting can help address these challenges while improving communication in healthcare.

1. Technology within every professional and service field is becoming more and more advance,
especially in health care. With the advancement of technology comes the advancement of
communication. However, not all advancements are deemed ethical. For an example, there are
several implications of patient-clinician messaging within the health care field. Patient privacy,
poor channel of conveying emotions, and the patient expectancy of the clinicians are all ethical
implications of patient-clinician messaging. “Clinicians have been reluctant to adopt the practice,
however, citing concerns about patient privacy, the possible impact on their workload, the lack of
reimbursement for time spent online, and licensure and liability issues(National Ethics Committee,
2004, p 4).
Patient privacy is very vital to patient-clinician messaging. Ensuring a patient privacy not only
should be done with great carefulness, but legally through HIPPA must be done. This may be an
uneasy task in that the clinician does not have means of verifying if he/she is talking to the patient or
not. Although e-mail is deeming to be secure, there is still a great chance of identity theft.
There are several measures and practices health care organizations can put into practice to assist
clinician with the ethical challenge of patient-clinician messaging. For an example, one tactic that
can be used is creating a secure patient account that only the patient and the provider have access.
Another measure that can be taken as previous stated is the ability to video chat. This does not ensure
that the clinician talking to the patient, but it also increases the channel of conveying emotions which
are very important within the health care field.
Reference
National Ethics Committee. (2004). Online Patient-Clinician Messaging: Fundamentals of Ethical Practice.
Retrieved from www.ethics.va.gov.