ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS

Ethical issues in the use of electronic health records for pharmacy medicines sales



Ethical issues in the use of electronic health records for pharmacy medicines sales

Introduction

There has been considerable scientific and public debate on the application of information technology (IT) in health care in the form of electronic health records (EHR) have been. Questions were raised as to whether such systems are mandatory, what information is recorded and saved to the patient that EHRs can access and for what purpose and whether patient privacy and confidentiality are major concerns. On the sale of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs in pharmacies - In this paper ethical issues are identified in relation to a previously unexplored application of EHRs. Specifically, the paper is on whether the focus of community pharmacists (pharmacy or staff) access to patient EHRs should the sale of OTC drugs to ensure that such sales are safe and appropriate to have. Pharmacist access to EHRs has been identified generally in terms of "role based" access situations such as the UK pharmacist increasing involvement in complementary medicine use reviews and prescription. But it is in this paper that the pharmacists' role in the supply of OTC medicines may be relevant to the use of EHRs but ethically problematic and pharmacists can more and more as seen agents of surveillance "(Harding and Taylor, 2002) argues.

Electronic Health Records

Medical records of some description have used in healthcare for many years and were originally formed in paper or cardboard. In Great Britain the establishment of the NHS in 1948 led a standardized envelope, card and folder system but the storage and maintenance of such records were not regulated and were only by the institution where they were needed held. Such a hospital would have a set of records and a medical practice to another, for example. IT advances during the late twentieth century have led to some form of computer record commonplace on health care, but these are usually still held by a special device, and are still not standardized even more accessible to other health professionals. With the publication of "Information for Health" (Department of Health, 2002), inform the British Government expressed its intention to improve the health records and the NHS and the best use of advances in IT. Key terms include allowing the patient to improve access to and control over their medical health professionals, the promotion of a larger context of health care organizations and institutions and offers a lifetime "from cradle to grave" document of a person's health and medications. In 2003, the NHS Care Records Service was introduced, suggests that all patients in England would be an individual electronic care record in form of both a summary and a detailed record have. Role-based access controls planned, establish conditions for health workers access to EHRs in relation to the type of data could be accessed and for what purpose (Frankel et al., 2005).

The importance of the OTC drug sales in UK Pharmacies

Another significance of the sale of medicines in ...