Identify current federal initiatives aimed at promoting electronic health information exchange.

Instructions:

As you have discussed so far in this course, healthcare has lagged behind other industries in terms of digitization of records, in particular patient health records.

Write a paper that includes the following:

- Explain the importance of information technology (IT) in patient transitions in different types of healthcare settings.

- Provide some insight into the status of the federal government initiatives that are underway (regional health information networks, electronic health records that are available from anywhere, etc.) with the goal of creating a health information exchange in the United States.

- Finally, knowing the status of the NHIN and initiatives, use critical thinking to analyze how your primary healthcare provider compares.

- Review the meaningful use implementation scenarios at the following site: Source: S&I Framework: Scenarios. Retrieved from http://www.siframework.org/scenarios.html

- Using one of these scenarios, describe a specific example of how your provider's office is state-of-the-art.

- Describe a scenario where the office is also lagging behind. Using that scenario, identify the primary obstacles the office faces, describe several potential solutions to this problem, and identify the one that would best fit your provider's office.