The case of Karen Quinlan interests me most because it is one of the first cases highlighting a moral dilemma of whether disconnecting life-support can be considered murder. I sympathize with the young girl and her family members who had to make such a difficult decision, and I also believe it is ethically correct that the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Quinlans. The court recognized the right to liberty and privacy as relating to this ‘medical area’ and allowing an incompetent patient’s family to decide whether they should die. As a result, this case is extremely significant to the healthcare field.
First, it emphasized the need to pay close attention to such situations and this moral dilemma and changed people’s views on similar cases. Medics realized that the criteria of death needed more clear clarification and identification. Second, although it did not result directly in the creation of new laws, it shed light on the possibility of applying the existing regulations to the case.
Further, when referring to healthcare breaches, it is indeed possible to find numerous cases when the privacy and security of protected medical information were compromised. For example, according to McKeon (2022), this summer, more than 2.6 million persons were impacted by a healthcare data breach that was faced by OneTouchPoint (OTP). The latter is a provider of certain services to numerous medical providers and health insurance organizations, meaning that OTP has access to the private information of patients. In April, OTP “discovered encrypted files on certain computer systems” and then “determined that an unauthorized party had accessed certain servers” (McKeon, 2022, para. 11).
As a consequence, more than thirty-five medical companies suffered from this breach, and the criminals received access to the names, health assessments information, and members IDs (McKeon, 2022). Indeed, the situation is extremely negative, and certain consequences cannot be estimated properly. OTP and the impacted companies experienced reputational and financial losses, and the safety of patients was exposed to risks. To avoid the breach, OneTouchPoint should have introduced extra review and safeguard rules, as well as ensured more frequent assessments of whether their systems and files are protected.
Reference
McKeon, J. (2022). Biggest healthcare data breaches reported this year, so far. Health IT Security. Web.