Social Responsibility Practices of EHR Vendors: An Analysis of Disclosures in Annual Corporate Reports and Websites.

Socially desirable outcomes within healthcare IT depend not only on the ethical behavior of individuals, but also on the actions and policies of large corporations. It is therefore important to have public accountability mechanisms that can be applied to corporations. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) publishes standards for assessing corporate transparency around ethical issues of broad public interest. The SASB standards and methodology were used to assess disclosures in the annual shareholder reports and websites of the top EHR vendors. The results showed a very low rate of meaningful disclosure.