RESPONSE

NEED RESPONSE TO THIS DISCUSSION IN APA FORMAT 2 PAGES WITH 2 REFERENCES
The article I chose was the Murphy article, “The journey to meaningful use of electronic health records”. This article discusses how the importance of Information Technology (IT) and EHR became important to the public and the timeline in which President George W. Bush made for facilities to implement “Meaningful Use”. Meaningful user is defined in the article and how Center for Medicare and Medicaid can and will reimburse for meaningful use. The financial aspect of HITECH and some of the other acts are discussed an broken down regarding how they came to be and why they each are important.
Meaningful use criteria the article mentions is “1. Improve quality, safety, and efficiency, and reduce
health disparities. 2. Engage patients and families. 3. Improve care coordination. 4. Improve population and public health. 5. Ensure adequate privacy and security protections for personal health information.”(Murphy 2010) All of these relate to my practice other than Engaging patients and families. This is not something we generally do in the corrections healthcare realm. The offenders are allowed to view portions of their chart for brief periods of time every quarter. The families are allowed to call and check on the offenders as long as there is a Release of Information signed by the offender on file. Neither the offender nor the families get the chart upon release, however, they can go through an attorney and have their records requested, but there is usually a fee associated with this. We are able to improve population and public health by being able to track the needed vaccines and assessments better, than hard charts. There are several passwords protected portals we have to clear before we can get on the Electronic chart. The security of the EHR is very important. Care coordination has greatly improved with not only EHR, but there is a software called “CARES” in which all of the outside provider referrals are scheduled and approved through. This will allow better tracking of the appointments that we send our offenders to, it will also allow us to run reports on how many appointments have to be cancelled or rescheduled due to security issues.
For the most part, I do believe EHR has helped us provided and track the care we are obligated to provide, but I feel there are some, non-medical people who are going to have to make big changes in the way they do things. Historically, the transfer officer relied heavily on the hard chart and now, everyone has electronic chart upon intake, there is NO information in the hard chart, but they REFUSE to take anyone to a different facility if there is no chart. This is going to take some time to get adjusted, but I think eventually, it’ll happen.
I am not sure if we could be considered meaningful users since we do not meet the entire criteria for the meaningful use, but we do not get any financial incentives from CMS anyway.
Reference
Murphy, J. (2010). Nursing informatics. The journey to meaningful use of electronic health records. Nursing Economic$, 28(4), 283–286. Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.