A Repository of Codes of Ethics and Technical Standards in Health Informatics

We present a searchable repository of codes of ethics and standards in healthinformatics. It is built using state-of-the-art search algorithms andtechnologies. The repository will be potentially beneficial for public healthpractitioners, researchers, and software developers in finding and comparingethics topics of interest. Public health clinics, clinicians, and researcherscan use the repository platform as a one-stop reference for various ethics codesand standards. In addition, the repository interface is built for easynavigation, fast search, and side-by-side comparative reading of documents. Ourselection criteria for codes and standards are two-fold; firstly, to maintainintellectual property rights, we index only codes and standards freely availableon the internet. Secondly, major international, regional, and national healthinformatics bodies across the globe are surveyed with the aim of understandingthe landscape in this domain. We also look at prevalent technical standards inhealth informatics from major bodies such as the International StandardsOrganization (ISO) and the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ourrepository contains codes of ethics from the International Medical InformaticsAssociation (IMIA), the iHealth Coalition (iHC), the American Health InformationManagement Association (AHIMA), the Australasian College of Health Informatics(ACHI), the British Computer Society (BCS), and the UK Council for HealthInformatics Professions (UKCHIP), with room for adding more in the future. Ourmajor contribution is enhancing the findability of codes and standards relatedto health informatics ethics by compilation and unified access through thehealth informatics ethics repository.