Introduction
Social media and informatics have been tremendously integrated into mainstream healthcare practice globally. The essence of social media in healthcare lies in its contribution to professional growth, the exchange of ideas, and exposure to newer and more advanced medical practices. While this is great, social media can undermine professionalism if not used correctly.
For the most part, facilities that have adopted informatics must expand their technological abilities. This entails hiring technological experts, data analysts, and healthcare professionals with IT training. As the transition to digital systems continues, healthcare institutions are bound to implement upgraded systems that deliver high-quality services. For the best outcomes, policies on smartphone use, social media engagement, accreditation decisions, and knowledge of pertinent ethical and legal frameworks must be put in place.
Social Media and Smartphone Usage Policy Guidelines
The policy will extensively cover smartphone usage for taking photos and videos of patients. In the naval story, the nurse posted a video she had taken at work. In the same video, she mishandled the infant by making it dance to her background music. The policy will prohibit using smartphones and other gadgets to take distasteful content to curtail such behavior.
On social media usage, the policy will prohibit the sharing of patient information on social media platforms (Militello et al., 2021). The nurse shared the viral video for the story published in Parents’ magazine across all social media platforms. The policy will strongly prohibit sharing content within the hospital, especially content insensitive to patients.
Aside from this, the policy will impose disciplinary measures on healthcare providers who violate smartphone and social media use policies. As indicated in the Naval Story, the staff involved in the viral video was fired for unprofessional conduct on social media. The policy will clearly outline disciplinary actions, such as suspension, issuance of a warning, and more severe measures, to deter such behavior shortly (Wager et al., 2021).
The policy will outline training programs to ensure that nurses are supported. The training will be conducted frequently for new nurses and those who have served longer. This way, the professionals will behave appropriately while using their phones and interacting on social media.
The case for Naval’s employees presents legal and ethical issues as spelled below. The child’s parents may take legal action for the nurse’s unprofessional conduct. The nurse may be sued for mishandling the infant, with the evidence captured in the video. For this complaint, the nurse will be found guilty and subjected to legal action deemed suitable by the court for the offense (Grace, 2022).
The healthcare facility may also be sued for having unprofessional staff. Given that the facility has dismissed the staff involved in the offense, the court will determine the appropriate means of delivering justice to the infant’s parents. The act violates HIPAA regulations requiring healthcare professionals to safeguard patient information. The shared video violates this as the nurse posted sensitive content without consent. This legal offense may result in financial consequences, including fines and compensation for the child’s family.
Views on Employers’ Access to Employees’ Social Media Posts
Social media screening for job placement and school admissions has become increasingly popular in business organizations and educational institutions. This trend has raised legal and ethical concerns about using people’s social media posts to evaluate their fit for the positions they apply for. Amidst the contention, it is inarguable that anything posted on social media is considered publicly available information.
This means it is available to anyone who wants to go through it and make their own judgment (Zhang et al., 2020). In the same breadth, I think potential employers, current employers, and colleagues have a right to access social media posts of potential employees and students. By sharing personal information on social media, individuals relinquish their privacy and give employers the right to access it to make hiring and admissions decisions.
However, whether employers and universities should make decisions based on social media posts is a double-edged issue. In my opinion, employers and universities should not make critical decisions about one’s social media posts. This is because people generally have different personalities at and away from work. I think most people tend to be fun when away from work. They will jump onto fun topics on social media and share their opinions.
Therefore, I think engagement on social media is also driven mainly by people wanting to belong to specific small communities (Farsi, 2021). This way, people engage in activities that favor their social life over their professional life. It is thus unfair to hire or admit individuals based on social media, as virtual interactions occur in a different context that may not necessarily affect people’s performance at work or students’ conduct in school.
In my view, using social media to decide to hire or admit an individual breaches the ethical standards of both exercises. In both situations, employers and school registries must maintain objectivity and neutrality. Including social media posts undermines objectivity in numerous ways (Huang et al., 2020). One is that social media reveals one’s affiliations with communities, religion, sexuality, and political interests, among other things. With access to this information, there is a high risk of biases that could have been avoided without it.
On the other hand, I have learned that the overarching objective of any company’s hiring process is to recruit the most competent employee. Going by this criterion, I contend that social media posts do not directly showcase a potential employee’s skills. Similarly, the best or well-behaved students cannot be singled out on social media because of the different personalities adopted on these platforms (Zhang et al., 2020). As much as hiring managers argue that social media screening is highly beneficial as a background check, the downsides are immensely detrimental to fair, just, and objective decisions.
Relationship Between Accreditation Decisions, Reimbursement, Quality of Care, and Informatics
The healthcare outcomes achieved by any healthcare facility are a construct of its accreditation decisions, reimbursement, quality of care, and informatics. To start with, accreditation decisions are a crucial driver of reimbursement and quality of care. Accreditation is a rigorous process that assesses a facility’s services against evidence-based, patient-centered practice.
According to the Joint Commission, the largest accreditation body in the US, hospitals must comply with specified Conditions of Operation (CoP) to receive accreditation (Willis, 2021). Pursuing accreditation is pivotal as it drives efforts to streamline facility operations. As a result, accreditation decisions are made to ensure high-quality care.
Accreditation decisions significantly affect a healthcare facility’s operations. The decision to work on accreditation is a game-changer for any hospital. With this move, the facility opens itself up to frequent reviews of its systems.
This way, professional visits are conducted to evaluate critical areas such as administration, patient attendance, equipment, hiring processes, professional certification, and compliance with all standards (Mantas, 2020). In the short term, polishing these elements results in successful accreditation and, consequently, a positive brand for the facility. In the long term, the accreditation sets the facility up for reimbursement, informatics, and high-quality care.
The Joint Commission ensures that facilities keen on accreditation receive reimbursement for select services. Compliance with Conditions of Operation qualifies healthcare organizations to receive reimbursement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) (Sudeep et al., 2023). As part of financial support for healthcare, reimbursement enables facilities to scale up their human and physical resources, thereby bolstering the quality of care.
Additionally, the Joint Commission establishes a reimbursement structure in which hospitals are enrolled in programs that facilitate innovation and technological expansion. With these programs, healthcare facilities can employ the best healthcare professionals and use the best machines and systems to enhance the patient experience.
Accreditation decisions are intricately related to informatics and quality of care. With the advent of technology, healthcare organizations worldwide continue to integrate informatics into their core services. Installing informatics software is a considerable expense to many hospitals, yet it is instrumental in providing evidence-based services (Willis, 2021).
For this reason, accreditation leads to reimbursement, which allows organizations to invest in data analytics software. Reimbursement enables progressive growth in the use of technology to deliver Telehealth, handle data, and improve efficiency in patient record management. The bigger picture is that accreditation gives facilities greater financial muscle to invest in informatics, which in turn supports accreditation and high-quality care.
Conclusion
Social media and informatics are inevitable in modern-day healthcare practice. As seen in the above scenarios, the use of these technologies is fraught with issues regarding professional conduct, information confidentiality, content disclosure, and patient privacy. Facilities must establish clear guidelines for the use of social media and data informatics. In putting together a policy document, a healthcare facility must be keen to create awareness of professional expectations.
The policy must set training programs for its staff to avoid gross misconduct. In addition, there must be clearly stated disciplinary actions or consequences for instances of misconduct. With these guidelines in place, the facilities will be better positioned to improve service delivery, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional patient care.
References
Farsi, D. (2021). Social media and health care, part I: Literature review of social media use by health care providers. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(4).
Grace, P. J. (2022). Nursing ethics and professional responsibility in advanced practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Huang, K., Li, M., & Markov, S. (2020). What do employees know? Evidence from a social media platform. The Accounting Review, 95(2), 199-226.
Mantas, J. (2020). The accreditation procedure ensures quality of education in biomedical and health informatics. In The importance of health informatics in public health during a pandemic (pp. 484-486). IOS Press.
Militello, M., Yang, R. A., Anderson, J. B., Szeto, M. D., Presley, C. L., & Laughter, M. R. (2021). Social media and ethical challenges for the dermatologist. Current Dermatology Reports, 1-8.
Sudeep, J., Goutham, M., Prasannakumar, G., Raghavendra, K., & Girish, S. C. (2023). Basics of healthcare informatics. In Intelligent systems in healthcare and disease identification using data science (pp. 1-33). Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Wager, K. A., Lee, F. W., & Glaser, J. P. (2021). Health care information systems: A practical approach for health care management. John Wiley & Sons.
Willis, C. A. (2021). Hospital accreditation: A primer. Journal of Hospital Librarianship, 21(3), 289-299.
Zhang, L., Van Iddekinge, C. H., Arnold, J. D., Roth, P. L., Lievens, F., Lanivich, S. E., & Jordan, S. L. (2020). What’s on job seekers’ social media sites? A content analysis and effects of structure on recruiter judgments and predictive validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105(12), 1530.
