PHIA is an abbreviation for Personal Health Information Act. PHIA is a health sector-specific privacy law that creates guidelines that trustees of personal health data must follow when assembling, using, revealing, sustaining and rescinding individual health information. PHIA is known to set out individuals’ civil rights concerning gaining entree to and practicing control of their individual health statistics (Gay, 2019).
PHIA can enhance efficiency on electronic health records to improve assurance to patients about safety and quality of care. This can be achieved by maximizing characters supporting the system, such as speed and other value-added functionalities. Having automated reports and order entry systems are ways to improve efficiency by documenting any health problem encountered using electronic health records. PHIA under the electronic health record helps the clinicians spend most of their time providing direct care to patients increasing the interaction leading to an increase in quality of care delivered. Provision of quality care requires clinical information documentation as an intrinsic aspect of clinical activity and is essential from both professional and legal standpoints (Gay, 2019). Managers should realize common trends of documentation to realize and manage elements needed for the effective implementation of the up-to-date medical health record.
Medical health assistants can access personal health records for certain circumstances, like when a patient is not recovering from a specific illness. In this kind of situation, the PHIA allows the medical assistant to check the illness’s probability of worsening. The other condition when a medical assistant can check personal health records is when wrong drugs are administered to a patient, and later complaints are brought up. Such incidence can be followed by law when the wrong drugs bring some Side effects (Herring, 2020). The other instance when the personal health record is checked is when a patient succumbs to a disease, and the medical practitioners check the causal factor.
Guardianship and power of attorney are tools that aid someone act on your behalf when you are incapacitated. Guardianship is a lawful association between the custodian and the person incapacitated and is no longer able to take the precaution of his or her matters. Such incidences are found when a patient is ill and is no longer able to make certain decisions. The power of attorney differs from guardianship since there are no guardianship transactions, unlike in this situation. Power of attorney occurs even before a problem or illness occurs, while guardianship occurs even after getting certain infections. Sometimes, when matters of illness are not involved, the power of attorney can immediately affect execution and understanding between the parties (Herring, 2020). Such incidences can arise when dealing with the court’s matters where the hiring of lawyers is necessary when an individual does not have one.
Guardians can access personal health information to an individual who is incapacitated to do so without written consent. This is by the logic that the individual could be so ill requiring a spouse to become a guardian. Written consent involves matters where individuals are not related by blood, or they are not close relatives. In the incidence of attorney’s power, written consent is necessary due to the involvement of transactions to hire a personal doctor or lawyer. The written consent serves as evidence in the court of law in case of breach of contract (Gay, 2019).
References
Gay, R. (2019). Virtue ethics and medical law. Philosophical Foundations of Medical Law, 11-25. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796558.003.0002
Herring, J. (2020). 1. Ethics and medical law. Medical Law and Ethics, 1-46. https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198846956.003.0001
