Case Study: When Radiation Therapy Kills.

Chapter 4: Case Study: When radiation therapy kills. The concepts of ethics are illustrated in this chapter. Ethics is a concern of humans who have freedom of choice. Responsibility, accountability and liability are issues that are raised by radiation technology. In this case we see that the carelessness or laziness of the medical technician, the lack of training in the handling of the equipment (software), also of the maintenance of the updates of the software can cause the life a person.

These errors cause by humans or machines can be prevented: if software had some type of safeguards that control the amount of radiation that they can deliver, if the technician or machine operators were more aware of the message errors, that appear on the screen, and if the hospitals had given the proper training to their staff. Technicians, hospital and the software manufacturer all need to collaborated with each other to create a common set of safety procedures, software features in order to prevent this to happen, all of them are responsible.

Each of them had the capacity to prevent this type of things to happen and they all decide to blame each other for their own mistakes. The use of a central reporting agency could reduce the numbers of radiation therapy errors in the future because this enables the state to identify trends and exposures that may create safety concerns.

If I were to design electronic software for a linear acceleration, I will certainly put some type of safeguards that control the amount of radiation that they can deliver, by this way trying to prevent the overdose of radiation. Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico Graduate Program in Management Chapter 4: Case Study: When radiation therapy kills. Jayline Benitez Hernandez #46654 MGM 6560 – Management of Information Systems September 1, 2011