General Session III

The Ethics of Healthcare Information - Dr. Ralph Didlake, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, University of Mississippi Medical Center

• Ethics are an informal code
• Individuals have codes of ethics and you have group/profession/corporate ethics.
• Professions practice specialized knowledge and pass it on to members they allow in.  Professional organizations then self regulate and create codes of conduct.
• Professional Membership comes with rights and responsibilities - to individuals you serve, to society, to colleagues, and to the profession - this is an implicit social contract.
• Challenges to Health Care Professionals - shifting societal expectations, medicalization, evolving delivery models, Affordable Care Act, specialty fragmentation, technology, complex environment, traditions, multi-disciplinary, conflicting professional obligations.
• The Gardner Model - The Effective Professional is: Excellent at what they do, Ethical about what they do, and Engaged in what they do.
• How for Medical Librarians? - MLA Code of Ethics - make your actions about patients as end users, profound fiduciary obligations - we are the caretakers of our professional knowledge, but also the knowledge of other professions.
• This is a unique position - how do we meet these obligations? - teach about academic integrity, teach about responsible conduct of research(this is required for NSF grants), archival functions(digital libraries), defining the boundaries of the medical literature(what is a good OA journal, peer-review), case reportage(Lincoln to JFK to Giffords, who is it ok to report on?), medical humanities programs(patients come in a context of topics outside of medicine-history, sociology, etc.), inter-professional education activities(library equipped to handle this)
• Barriers - curriculum is crowded, no access to curriculum committees, marginalization of non-clinical content
• Suggestion - embed curriculum elements - embed slides into already existing courses and lectures.  Can weave these across courses with students existing instructors.