Ethical Issues in Interoperability of Electronic Healthcare Systems

The advent of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the past decades has led to the wide adoption of electronic healthcare systems in healthcare. This has in actual fact led to the improvement in the quality of healthcare by enhancing the collection, storage, retrieval and access to health information. In addition, the use of ICT in healthcare provides more efficient healthcare services by reducing medical errors and costs thereby increasing patients ’ safety and satisfaction. Moreover, patients ’ information can be located in more than one electronic healthcare system. This is because patients may have more than one healthcare provider or they may move from one location to another. Hence, it becomes pertinent for patients ’ information to be available in all electronic healthcare systems at all points of care. Thus