Question

Health IT legislation includes: - 21st Century Cures Act (Cures Act) - Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015 - Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) of 2009 - Section 618 of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) of 2012, - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 - Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) These are the main regulations that govern health IT. Discuss the pros and cons of the regulations. What challenges would a solo practitioner might encounter during the implementation of EHRs in order to meet the meaningful use objectives?

Answer 1

We'll discuss the pros and cons of every regulation under Health It legislation -

Cures Act

• Pros - Will give more freedom to Food and drug administration in R&D of medicines and devices and will save a huge sum of money for pharmaceutical firms. Also, it would provide economic benefits to most of the medical organization.
• Cons - Would cut a lion's share from Public Health Fund
• Can also end up opening the passage for unsafe drug and device approval

MACRA

• Pros - Emphasis more on improved and affordable technology and outcomes of the patient.
• Provides more funding to Children’s Health Insurance Program for families who can't afford or qualify Madicaid
• Cons - The act is inordinately complicated and exercised immoderately fast

HITECH

• Pros - Digital records reduces human error and improves efficiency and convenience
• Reduces paper work and space and provide better access to patient's record
• Cons - Making records digital can eventually led to privacy issue. Also, some technical issue can led to losing the entire data.
• Incorrect data copying or not updating on time can make the patient panic since he/she has also the access to it now.

Section 618 of FDASIA

• Pros - The proposed structure promote innovation, safeguard patient welfare, protects from replicating and adds more accountability.
• Provides mobile medical application
• Cons - Does not include risk-based stratification (categorization of patient at high risk and low risk)

HIPAA

• Pros - Patients can check, copy, and even rectify their medical data.
• Forbid employers from retrieving and make use of personal health data
• Allow patients to change jobs without panicking about their existing health plan with the employer
• Cons - Has increased the burden of medical paperwork
• Produced a large number of consultants bothering medical professional with lengthy legislation

Affordable Care Act

• Pros - Health insurance is more affordable and within reach of more people
• Preexisting health problem are also welcomed with no limit on total bill covered.
• More money is saved in prescribed drug and screening
• Cons - Insurance companies take higher premium and also the taxes have been raised to compensate the difference
• People not having insurance are fined
• People losing jobs or working hours since employers ought to provide cover health cover to their employee which hit hard on their pocket.

Challenges that a solo practitioner might encounter during the implementation of EHRs in order to meet the meaningful use objectives are -

• The products required for Electronic Health Records are very costly and need a huge funding. At the same time, applications are not standardized.

• These Electronic Health Records are more complex than paper-based records.

• There are many risk involved in EHRs like crashing of system, programming errors or obsolete or updation of software with time.

• This concept provides a better service to them to the users but gives no benefit to the providers.

• Privacy and security of the patient becomes vital and risky.