Meaningful Use Of EHR In Health Care

Another issue is caused when patients have multiple encounters with many different healthcare providers and results in fragmentation of the medical record. There is often very little if any exchange at all of information that makes up the patients historical medical record. There is limited overall healthcare information that is had by each healthcare provider and healthcare organization. The level of fragmentation depends on the ability of the patient to communicate their health information to the healthcare provider and the ability of the healthcare provider to gather the health information. Furthermore, there are many costs of supporting paper-based records including duplication, distribution, and storage of manual patient records. Duplicating

Repeating these procedures can create adverse medical occurrence and also waste valuable medical resources and contributes increasing cost of healthcare. (Iyer, 2013)

Solutions

There are provisions in HITECH that provide healthcare organizations incentives to properly implement an EHR system. One of the provisions was centered on the reimbursements provided by Medicare and Medicaid. There was a criterion established and labeled as “Meaningful Use” to develop standards for the use of EHR for the exchange of patient clinical data from different healthcare organizations, insurers and patients. There are three stages of meaningful use that began in 2010. Stage one ended in 2012 primarily focused on the adoption of EHR’s by capturing electronic health data in a standardized format.

Selecting the system is a complex and a heavy resource demanding task a company can start. The terms EMR and EHR are similar and have been exchanged many times, but there are differences.

The EMR system is specifically used to replace the old paper medical records and charts that have been used by doctors and hospitals. These systems can range from paper records and medical charts being digitally converted into advanced healthcare systems. An EHR is an integrated medical record system with the ability to transfer information from many sources like radiology images, immunizations, prescription orders, and laboratory results.

There are many options for EHR’s that can deliver advanced communication and management of clinical decision support. These systems have the proven reliability of decreased medical errors; significantly improve the quality of care, and save valuable clinical staff time. The cost saving and improved efficiencies are achieved by reducing medical errors, increasing clinical staff accessing speed of patient records, reducing the adverse drug interactions. This ability quantified by providing management and clinical decision support to considerably increase health outcomes and the quality of patient healthcare. (Ginsberg,