Health Information Technology for economic and clinical health act (HITECH Act) was established in 2009 as a way to encourage healthcare organizations to utilize electronic health records all the while promoting technology as a whole. According to HSS.gov the HITECH act “addresses the privacy and security concerns associated with the electronic transmission of health information, in part, through several provisions that strengthen the civil and criminal enforcement of the HIPAA rules”.
Everyone is familiar with health outbreaks like measles, the flu, and most recently the Zika virus and many can question how healthcare officials identify these outbreaks. Customarily these outbreaks where reported by phone calls, fax, and paper correspondence.
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The overall push for electronic health record use for hospitals and physicians was to enhance our countries use of electronic health records systems on a national level". Since providers receive incentives for utilizing electronic health record systems, public-health reporting is a great way to ensure that the meaningful use requirement is met. However in the article entitled “Some Hospitals Are Falling Behind In Meeting 'Meaningful Use' Criteria And Could Be Vulnerable To Penalties In 2015” claims there are many incentives to adopting electronic health care records which total $30 million dollars. Conversely, many are struggling on how to understand how these payments are distributed throughout hospitals. While there has been a considerable increase in terms of the amount of hospitals receiving EHR incentive payments “between 2011 (17.4 percent) and 2012 (36.8 percent). However, this increase was not uniform across all hospitals, and the overall proportion of hospitals receiving a payment for meaningful use was