Literature Review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Literature Review - Essay Example The leakage may then lead to security threats when the unauthorized persons manipulate the data for their benefits (Quinn, 2010). Ethics in information systems guide companies on how to handle their confidential data. Governments also formulate laws that govern the use of information systems to prevent the privacy threats. Professional bodies such as nursing that deal with confidential information of their patients adhere to ethics and laws to prevent the violation of privacy laws of data. The National Health Systems uses information system applications to make their services efficiently. The users of the applications follow the rules of ethics to ensure that they do not violate the privacy of patients’ information. One of the applications used in the health systems is the Summary Care Record (SCR). This application stores information of patients in a central database such that it can be accessed from various hospitals. The access of information in various hospitals enables pa tients to attend the health institution of their choice (Maccoby, Norman, & Margolies, 2013). The ethical principles that govern the privacy of SCRs include the golden rule, risk aversion, the rule of change by Decartes, and utilitarian hypothesis. The utilitarian theory argues that organizations and individuals should perform functions that benefit more people in the society (Diney, Hu, Smith, & Hart, 2013). National hospitals use the SCR in a way that benefits the whole society. This is because the citizens attend the hospital of their choice whenever they are sick. The doctors and nurses use the system to check the health history of patients; this helps them to determine the best treatment for their clients. The privacy of health records is also guarded by the rule of change that was formulated by Decartes, which argues that firms should use techniques that may be repeated more than once (Tajero, & De, 2012). This means that actions that may not be repeated are unethical, and the y may violate the privacy of information. The repeated action in the use of the health records is mainly the use of passwords and identification cards, which ensure that only the authorized medical practitioners access the information of patients. The authorized persons who access information may do so numerous times. An action that may not be repeated is hacking, which leads to the access of the information about a company by unauthorized persons through the exploitation of a system’s weakness (Rosenberg, 2004). Hacking violates the privacy of patients’ information meaning that it is an unethical act. The weakness of Decartes principle is that it fails to specify whether the repeated action is right. This is because in some cases, activities such as hacking are possible to repeat when the hacker identifies the weakness in a system. Since hacking is unethical, repeating it violates the principle of privacy meaning that the rule of change misleads users (Rosenberg, 2004 ). The other ethical principles that govern the use of hospital computers leading to information privacy include machines in ways that respect the society, not interfering with other people’s work in the computer, and not using the machine to steal. Computer users who observe these tenets promote the confidentiality of their information and that of others (McCarthy, & Halawi, 2013). The social issues in information systems include those that govern the way a company mingles with the