Discussion: "Creating Effective Health Systems"
Please respond to the following:
From the first and second e-Activities, summarize the key features of the HITECH Act. Next, specify the overall impact of the adoption of The HITECH Act for health care organizations within the United States.
From the third e-Activity, analyze the primary manner in which EHR technology ensures improvement in the quality of patient care. Next, speculate on the overall impact that the health care information system standards have on the adoption of EHR technology within health care organizations. Provide a rationale for your response.
The HITECH Act was enacted for many reasons. They wanted physicians to be held accountable for what they did in the course of a day. This would include how many patients were seen, what procedures were performed, what they were treated for. This all needs to be documented on the EMR/EHR in order to be complaint with the standards of medicine.
The main features of the HITECH ACT covers four areas. The first area is the Enhanced HIPPA enforcement. With the enforcement of the HITECH ACT, penalties are much more strict if a person violates HIPPA laws. The next aspect is Breach Notifications. In any practice information needs to be kept secure. It can be easily accessed by unauthorized users. The HITECH ACT requires that {if over 500} individuals are contacted if their private information is breached. Previously medical records were primarily written on paper. Now that information is electronic, and may be able to be accessed remotely or outside of the practice, the HITECH ACT requires patient give permission for that access. The HITECH ACT is accountability for anyone who has access to the EMR/HER. (USF Health, (2017), usfhealthonline.com)
EHR ensures quality improvement in many ways. The first of which is accessing information. If an older visit is needed, the user is able to click on that date and all the things that were done for that visit are on the screen for the physician to use. The other aspect of information is that each category is in a designated spot. For example demographics is one area, medical history another. If a patient is allergic to anything, it will pop up on the screen and alert anyone who is looking at the chart. This can help people avoid catastrophic mistakes.
If an EHR software program can be logged in at remote sites, then it is easier to share information. This can prevent delays in treatment and diagnosis. For example if a patient comes into the ER unconscious and is unable to convey anything, then the staff would log in and access the record to avoid any complications.
The overall impact that health care information system standards have on EHR are for a few reasons. The first of which is for compliancy. With the cost of health care skyrocketing, the standards were put into place to ensure that DR's are not performing unnecessary expensive testing, or over prescribing medication. They would also be following the billing practices. This also includes the complexity of the exam. Each time they put information on a patients chart, they must justify why and how they got there.