The Development of Health IT Infrastructure - Essay Example

The impact of the 2009 HITECH Act on healthcare: Information technology over the past decade witnessed tremendous improvement. The impact of this improvement is apparent in the industrial, business and travel sectors (McGonigle 286). The health sector is catching on to these developments hence the need to describe the relationship of these advancements. The legal approach to ensure favourable instructions to the involved parties is as in the 2009 (HITECH) Act. This act is a subsidiary of the (ARRA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The primary aim of this act is to ensure adoption of health information technology and its subsequent meaningful use (Peden 21). The HITECH Act specifies who an eligible provider is hence ensuring that there are minimal discrepancies. Currently, Doctor of Medicine or Osteopathy, Doctor of Dental Surgery or Dental Medicine, Doctor of Podiatric Medicine, Doctor of Optometry and a Chiropractor are eligible providers. The doctors in this case should not perform more than 90% of his services in the inpatient or emergency rooms. The government’s involvement in this Act is crucial to its success. The success of this act has notable benefits to the nation in regard to health IT. The first benefit is the development of Health IT infrastructure across the country. This step includes Medical incentives for doctors and hospital aimed at stimulating the adoption of electronic acquisition, storage and exchange of patient information. Secondly, health IT will ultimately reduce government expenditure by $10 billion. This is because the quality of healthcare will tremendously improve due to reduced medical errors, duplicative and coordinated care. These savings will enable the government to increase the scope of health care services and improve their quality. The doctors will also enjoy efficient storage retrieval and gathering of information. This efficiency extends t their ability to provide timely and appropriate medical care. The aim of the government in implementing this Act is also to make healthcare less costly so that it is accessible to all citizens. Therefore, patients will benefit from the efficiency of this system and the reduced costs of medical care. The length of stay in hospital can significantly reduce as a result of (CPOE) Computerized Physician Order Entry as this process reduces adverse drug events. Other benefits of Health IT are apparent even before the implementation of the act. These benefits include reduced hospitalization and inappropriate medication. These achievements are through pervasive screening of cancers and proper vaccination. All these procedures rely on the development of health IT end Electronic Medical Records (Hudock 7). McGonigle summarizes these benefits as: “...enhanced aptitude to perform examination and monitoring of fatal disease conditions, increased provision of guideline based care, and reduced medication errors” (291). Hand written documents are hard to interpret seeing as doctors handwritings are not resolutely legible. People, therefore, prefer electronically produced documents to hand written documents. There are other benefits such as increased efficiency in emergency response, efficiency of the ambulances in regard to first aid and finally the informed decision making. Provision of health services is one that traditionally requires privacy considerations. With the adoption of information technology in the health sector, it is imperative that the government and associate bodies ensure that privacy is paramount. The HITECH Act has this provision in Subtitle D. This subtitle addresses privacy and security concerns arising as a result of electronic transmission of health information. The act describes guided methodologies and technologies that determine whether protected health information is usable, readable, or decipherable. Also, the act dictates authorized individuals such that the methodologies restrict unauthorized persons form accessing let alone deciphering this information. The scope of this act aims at ensuring that there is efficiency and protection for citizens in all sectors of the health market. For instance, Sec.13402 of HITECH dictates that HHS dictates breach notification regulation for business associates and covered entities within the 1996 (HIPAA) Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Also, (Sec. 13407 of HITECH) requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to provide breach notification regulation for vendors of non-HIPAA covered entities and personal health records. With this breach notification in place, implementing security regulations in accordance with HIPAA is easy. It is understandable that the new regulations are strict than the previous ones given the threat information technology poses to the security of privacy. (HITECH) Act of 2009 helped to revise previous acts to make them more relevant in the face of the current changes in the health sector. For instance, Section 13410(d) of the HITECH Act revised section 1176(a) of the Social Security Act (the Act). This revision established four categories of violations revealing an increase of culpability, corresponding tiers of penalty that increase the minimum penalty for each violation and a maximum penalty of $1.5 million for violations of identical provision. This further amends section 1176(b) of the Social Security Act. This amendment thereby makes a covered entity that did not know, with or without exercise of reasonable diligence, of a violation liable for penalties under the lowest penalty tier. Secondly, the act provides prohibition of penalization if the entity did not violate due to willful neglect (DeNisco 320). With the acts security provision, patients are able to receive reports in regard to disclosures the made by Electronic Health Records. An institution or vender can only disclose of patient health information to a limited data set hence ensuring privacy. Also, the patient has the power to consent or refuse their information to be marketed (Childers 204). The penalties for persons breaching the set guidelines for access and disclosure of patient health information are clear. Any individual breaching the set rules is liable for legal penalties. This helps to safe guard the privacy of patients (DeNisco 318). The set time by which relevant institutions should comply with the provisions of the Act is 2015. However, it is not all smooth for the Act as it faces some shortcomings. It is currently proving expensive to abandon poor EHR systems due to vendor lock-in. Also, implementation costs are at an increase because of scope creep. All this costs cripple, to some extent, the implementation the act. The government is still facing conflict under the new federal standards in regard to what is the criterion for distributing incentives. The direness of situation escalates because the project management is lacking given the large stakes (Hudock 1). Experts view the idea that the benefits of this new reform will be enough to offset the expenses incurred for implementation as a gamble. Others speculate that the only way this Act is a success is if the cost of healthcare increases to fund the implementation and then drops after the implementation (Hudock 8). The importance of this act has drawn the interests of many groups in society. Universities have set out to study the proposed efficiency of this act in regard to providing efficient medical care. The results indicate that the association of Electronic Health Records and quality ambulatory care is not as significant. Other studies on conditions such as diabetes also reveal similar results. In light of this Hudock (6), proposes that the focus should not conform to improving technology. The technologies should extend to implementation of practical approaches designed to integrate health IT advancements in order to improve health care. Works Cited: Childers, Randall. Forensics of a Medical Plan: Dissecting Health Benefits on a Company Level. New York: Xlibris Corporation, 2011. DeNisco, Susan. Advanced Practice Nursing. New York: Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2012. Hudock, Robert. "Analysis of the HITECH Acts Incentives to Facilitate." Health Care and Life Sciences (2009): 1 - 8. McGonigle, Dee. Book Only: Nursing Informatics and the Foundation of Knowledge. New York: Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2011. Peden, Ann. Comparative Health Information Management. New York: Cengage Learning, 2011. Read More