Health Policy 2: Legal & Ethical Issues

Course Description
This course presents an introduction to the legal and ethical issues that arise in management of health services organizations. Topics include: ethics in business and clinical decision making, tools for understanding ethics and ethical analysis, professional and organizational guidelines in making ethical decisions, including codes of ethics and mission statements, organizational responses to ethical issues, including ethics processes, such as institutional ethics committees and institutional review boards, conflicts of commitment and conflicts of interest, patient and community concerns and end of life decisions. Additionally, the course will review legal principles development, application and assessment, and, resource allocation and social responsibility. Other topics covered include: liability, health care institutions as corporations, the nature and scope of public health authority, antitrust, fraud and abuse, privacy and confidentiality, tax implications, regulatory oversight, legal requirements for access to health care, nondiscrimination, conflicts of interest and constitutional constraints on public health initiatives.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course students must demonstrate mastery of the following competencies:

• Understand how the law applies to the health care system, including providing healthcare services to patients; organizing, managing, and regulating the delivery of healthcare services as well as public and private health insurance programs.
• Analyze and interpret health care-related statutes and court decisions.
• Analyze health-related legal issues and explain the analysis.
• Identify factual situations that raise legal issues in health care.
• Learn how to find various types of health-related legal materials, and understand legal citation form.
• Use the law to promote health policy values and goals.
• Demonstrate the inclusion of ethics in professional practices, as well as the ability to stimulate social accountability and community stewardship.
• Demonstrate a practice of accountability.

Course Director: William Freedman, JD, Dinsmore and Shohl, LLP and Guest Faculty, College of Allied Health Sciences