Abstract
Healthcare is a field where the influence of ethics needs to be strong. It should also cover the area of information system development in healthcare. Great amounts or research about ethics, healthcare and information system development and combinations of those can be found. However, the actual development of healthcare information systems has a serious lack of understanding of ethical codes of healthcare and it seems that financial values may bypass ethical ones. Several examples of the consequences to healthcare information systems, in which financial values in conjunction with technological determinism are controlling the decisions, are presented and critiqued.
The four principles of medicine: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice are seen as a promising basis for analysis of information system development in healthcare. The four principles seem to be suitable for healthcare professionals and - as discussed in this paper - for information system developers. Hence these principles could be held as the common ethical ground for both. If these principles could be put into actual use in information system development of healthcare sector many problems faced would be solved, or at least some of the main problems in it can be revealed.
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Koskinen, J.S., Heimo, O.I., Kimppa, K.K. (2012). A Viewpoint for More Ethical Approach in Healthcare Information System Development and Procurement: The Four Principles. In: Eriksson-Backa, K., Luoma, A., Krook, E. (eds) Exploring the Abyss of Inequalities. WIS 2012. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 313. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32850-3_1
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