Today, providing health care involves numerous participants having varying ethical perspectives. Ethical health care delivery thus requires developing legitimate shared expectations for ethical conduct. Further, we need tools for measuring whether each participant is meeting these expectations; that is, performance measures for ethics. The Ethical Force Program (E-Force) was created to develop, test and disseminate such performance measures. One domain that has been addressed is the protection of health care informational privacy. To help validate measures, the E-Force Oversight Body includes high-level participants from managed care, physician and other practitioner groups, patient groups, accrediting organizations, government and academia. To further enhance content validity, an Expert Advisory Panel on Privacy was also appointed, which included individuals with experience in public health, research, medicine, informatics and law. These 2 groups worked in a structured consensus process, using a numerical grading system in iterative rounds, to rate and refine topic areas and specific expectations; deriving a detailed set of expectations for health information privacy, which should apply to every organization accessing or using personally identifiable health information. Eight Content Areas for measurement were defined: Transparency, Consent, Collection Limitations, Security, Individual Access, Data Quality, Information Use Limitations, and Accountability. Each Content Area has several specific expectations for performance (“measurable elements”), which can potentially be measured using site reviews, surveys and policy reviews. Based on these validated content areas and measurable elements, new performance measures are now in development.
Learning Objectives: Attendees will learn about a process used to validate new performance measures for ethics, using the domain of privacy as a core example. Specific expectations for privacy protections among those with access to identifiable health information will be addressed
Keywords: Privacy, Performance Measurement
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.