To refocus awareness on the original mandate of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations, this article will review record keeping requirements and examine patient-doctor and interdisciplinary communication as a way to improve the health care consumer's trust in the privacy of their personal information while facilitating integrated and fluid health care delivery systems. The HIPPA rules especially important in medical settings are discussed with a special emphasis on issues confronting psychologists who practice outside of medical institutions and hospitals. The article also examines important implications for practice activities when psychologists attend patients who are hospitalized.
General bioethical principles, such as autonomy, nonmalfeasance, justice, and care, provide the foundation for ethical decision making in health care. Aspiring to uphold the ethical principles is a fluid process, based on advances in health care, social and cultural pressures, and applications of the principles both to specific clinical situations and policy making. In this paper, we review the principles and discuss their application in rehabilitation and in health care. We argue that rehabilitation psychologists have unique expertise to impact ethical decision making at all levels of social structure, and that rehabilitation represents a critical forum in which this role definition of psychologists manifests itself. In addition, the principles themselves, if given substantive meaning in their practical application, can and should drive adaptive legislation in support of rehabilitation and health care goals in developing ethical care alternatives.The development of ethical thought in health care has provided an appropriate scheme for evaluating clinical decision making, professional conduct, policy development, and legislation. Using ethical principles to establish moral groundwork, and as an aspirational rationale for health care, ensures that higher order purposes are the umbrella for both action and evolution in the field. In this paper, we first overview the basic principles from which ethical thought and decision making in health care evolved. We then provide a discussion of the applications of these principles to rehabilitation and the
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