EHRs: HITECH Incentive Program & Meaningful Use Status - Essay Sample

Introduction

Electronic Health Records continue to be a primary topic in the healthcare industry. EHRs are the federal government strategy used to transforming the healthcare delivery levels in America. The HITECH (Health Information Technology Economic and Clinical Health) Act defines an HER incentive program to be established. The provisions of HITECH state that healthcare providers can receive the incentive payments only if they achieve the Meaningful Use status. The congress created an Electronic Health Records program in 2009. Lawmakers decreed that even with the creation of such a program, it was necessary to ensure that healthcare institutions make meaningful use of the EHRs. The congress did not clarify on the definition of the term meaningful use in the context of legislation. For the lawmakers, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was responsible for creating the definition of the meaningful use, with reference to the adoption of the EHRs. Despite the safety and security concerns in the health care sector, EHRs play a critical part in improving healthcare services and patient information safety.

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Over the years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) continues to provide financial incentives to the eligible healthcare providers that can prove and detail on the implementation of the meaningful use in their HER systems (Joukes, 2019). For the CMS proof revolves around the impact of the EHRs in respect to positive patient care which impacts the American population. Healthcare providers can only meet the Meaningful Use objective laid out in the EHRs program. The following discussion summarizes on the legal, financial, and ethical issues developing from the result of the Meaningful Use legislation. A specific area of focus in the discussion explains the implementation of EHR and Meaningful Use legislation at the healthcare organization.

EHRs also tend to meet the different goals set by the federal government which target to improve the healthcare sector. The different goals of the EHRs include improving quality of care, engaging patients and families in care, advancing the coordination of the kind of care, and improving public health. Other stipulated roles of EHRs include maintaining healthcare information confidentiality and security, and reducing the cost for care delivery (MIT Critical Data, 2019). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was responsible for enacting the legislative background and regulatory history

Meaningful Use plays a critical role in the exchange of different patient clinical data. The exchange of patient information happens between the healthcare providers, the insurers, and the patients. EHR information exchange is beneficial to both the patient and healthcare providers since it helps to advance patient care, data security and even the healthcare information technology industry extensively. The Meaningful Use legislation has changed overtime starting with phase one in the year 2010 (Hammaker, Kaymak, & Tomlinson, 2019). At the initial stages, the emphasis was on the certified adoption of the Electronic Health Records. Phase one of the adoption also addressed issues of proper electronic data gathering and storage, and data sharing. During that time, only the eligible providers would receive the incentives payments after meeting a set of nine core goals and a single public health objective.

The government healthcare actors introduced the Meaningful Use stage two later in the year 2012. The second phase happened to increase the thresholds of the criteria compliance. The compliance phase stipulated the frameworks of clinical decision support, care coordination requirement and even the introduction of the patient engagement rules. Stage three commenced in 2014 to 2016 with a central focus on interoperability that aimed to improve patient outcomes within the various healthcare centers (Joukes, 2019). Due to legislation process, stage three delayed giving providers an opportunity to meet standards at the onset of the year 2017.

The Meaningful Use legislation mandate that for those hospitals or care providers seeking incentive payments in stage one, they have to utilize a set of the core functions (14 functions for the hospitals and fifteen for the providers). The legislation also demanded that these institutions and individuals select additional five functions from the menu of the ten optional features. Amongst the ten optional functions, one has to effectively address the public health concerns (MIT Critical Data, 2019). The functioning of the Meaningful Use was that the two groups (hospitals and providers) must utilize their systems to execute each of the function within a period set at 90 days. The 90 day period means that the two groups must have meet numerical targets continuously to a period dating one year with recorded data that can be easily evaluated by a computer device. Thus, they would have demonstrated their Meaningful Use for the 12 month period.

In accomplishing the Meaningful Use strategy, care providers were entitled with responsibilities to use the HER systems that comply with the technical standards structured by the Office of the National Coordinator. Systems used must have been certified as compliant, they must be functional and very secure for use (Joukes, 2019). The HHS-authorized organizations would then offer certification to the healthcare institutions. Consequently, they would be allowed an opportunity to upgrade the existing HER systems in the hospitals and even their medical offices shortly before requesting for certification.

Healthcare providers continue to struggle to implement the Meaningful Use when dealing with EHRs. However, they continue to experience significant challenges that affect payment incentives from the federal government. Some providers face challenges when attempting to build the HER functionality which affects the process of capturing the clinical quality measures (CQMs) in the hospital setting (Hammaker, Kaymak & Tomlinson, 2019). Other providers fail to effectively transform the clinical summaries into the desired standard formats for various clinical exchanges. In other states, hospitals have faced challenges when developing new CPOE functionality into the expected ambulatory products. In some other related cases, healthcare providers have also met the challenges of failing to produce effective discharge and transition summary reports which are central to patient care.

In attempting to meet the Meaningful Use obligation, health organization have to ensure proper incorporation of the EHRs regulations. Improving the Electronic Health Records means that a healthcare organization has to achieve their absolute potential and support the sustainable payment reforms. The healthcare providers (policy makers) have to consider empowering the ONC and the CMS to ensure that they expand their standards and requirements for effective monitoring of the EHR vendors. Vendors have to facilitate efficient practices that would generate quality reports with updated definitions. These element of upgrades would ensure that the healthcare organizations can extract quality data from the batches of the continuity-of-care documents (MIT Critical Data, 2019). Since the raw data is for secondary use, venders should help providers to create a kind of explicit requirement platform that supports quality improvement. The same would be effective in providing quality practice in the population health measurement segments.

Healthcare organizations have to ensure that they adopt the new initiatives from the ONC who mainly encourage venders to facilitate EHRs operations with standard application programing interfaces (Hammaker, Kaymak & Tomlinson, 2019). Providers can also meet the Meaningful Use objective by using mapping technologies that constitute of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability resources. Institutions working with the patient populations should also ensure to hire IT healthcare experts that understand the new reporting requirements.

The Electronic Health Record uptakes continue to expand, proving that in the future, more healthcare provides will have to deal with increasing expectations. The expectation rise is predicted to develop from electronic interchange of laboratory information (Delisle, McLamb & Inch, 2019). Therefore, hospitals must prepare their staff and patient population to meet the demands of the future EHRs environments. Even though many hospitals manage to implement and maintain a high level of Meaningful Use program, there is still the question of meeting and implementing the LIS-HER interfaces which happen to be the next phase of EHRs requirements. Consequently, hospitals have to make initiatives to serve their provider communities

Conclusion

To conclude, primary care continues to be the center focus for the healthy communities. The federal government continues to insist on the application of the Meaningful Use legislation, which aims at improving the quality of care administered by providers. The federal value-based payment programs tend to prompt clinicians to improve the quality of care delivery. Thus, healthcare institutions should view Meaningful Use legislation as a drive to promoting the use of EHRs. In light of such acknowledgement, Health IT clinicians need to ensure that they deliver credible clinical quality data which is essential in promoting patient care. The professional team must also understand that external reporting is significant to warrant payment incentives.

References

Delisle, D. R., McLamb, A., & Inch, S. (2019). Transformation and Your New EHR: The Communications and Change Leadership Playbook for Implementing Electronic Health Records. London: Productivity Press

Hammaker, D. K., Kaymak, Y. C., & Tomlinson, S. J. (2019). Health records and the law. Massachusetts : Jones & Bartlett Learning

Joukes, E. (2019). Implementing Structured Data In Electronic Health Records. Ede : Print Service Ede

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2018). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge. MA : Jones & Bartlett Learning

MIT Critical Data,. (2019). Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records. Switzerland : Springer Open