Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas Assignment

Ethical Challenges and Dilemmas Assignment

This discussion has two options. Please choose either Option A or Option B to respond to and indicate within your post which you chose. For both options, please use the AHIMA Code of Ethics as a reference (see Fig. 6.2 in Chapter 6).

Option A: Imagine you are a supervisor in the Health Information Services Department of a facility with a policy prohibiting secondary employment with a competitor. One of the employees you supervise is a coder who has just begun the process of repaying student loan debt. The coder has decided that she needs a second job to help defray expenses. She has been offered a position as a coder for one eight-hour shift per weekend at a doctor’s office. This doctor is a member of your facility’s medical staff. Because you addressed the issue of secondary employment in the coder’s entrance interview, she comes to you now seeking advice. (Case Study, p. 126)

As the direct supervisor, how should you respond to this employee? What legal issues are present in this case?
What ethical considerations should you take into account before providing guidance to this employee? Please thoroughly explain your rationale.

Option B: Pretend you are a new manager in a health care facility, you have recently completed an ethics training for your company. You are now expected to communicate this information to your staff to ensure that they are aware of the current ethical issues facing the facility. Your supervisor has requested that you cover the following:

Discuss the primary ethical challenges in the health care field. How do we address generalized challenges, the role of ethics in supervision, health care challenges, and health information management challenges? What are the reasons for these challenges, and how can they be resolved?
Guided Response (for Option A and Option B): Review several of your classmates’ posts. Provide a substantive response to at least two of your peers, one who selected Option A and one who selected Option B. Consider the extent to which the Code of Ethics guides our actions in health information management. Did your classmate adequately address the ethical challenges in their response? Describe 1-2 strengths and weaknesses of their response. Would you suggest anything different? Why? After reading their post, would you change anything about your initial response?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

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The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.