Healthcare organizations and their compliance departments spend a significant amount of time focusing on interactions with individuals. These diverse groups include everyone from patients to human research participants, along with many others, and these interactions necessitate different types of consent to do things like successfully provide service, obtain and use information, and engage in research activities. Throughout this course, you will explore some of the obligations that apply to healthcare organizations regarding these interactions with individual people.

To meet compliance standards, it is critical to keep a patient's health information private. Within the course, you will engage with tools designed to assure the capture of all the elements of a patient's informed consent, including consent to treatment, obtaining and disclosing information, and consent to participate in research. Various types of law apply in this context, including common law as well as federal and state statutes. As you progress, you will develop skills to distinguish among the various types and purposes of patient consent. You will also examine ways to protect this information once it is captured, not only by enforcing HIPAA regulations but by preventing potential exposure like a data breach or cyberattack.

Many medical advances have been made through research with human subjects, sometimes at a cost to the patients. You will also examine examples of unethical research and how recent guidelines have been put in place to avoid the misuse of human subjects. You will also discover how such special protections of patients include children. Organizations need to stay abreast of requirements surrounding consent and personal information, particularly as technology and the medium of interaction evolve over time. This course will help you to do just that.