Question

I am the Act which promotes adoption and meaningful use of EHRs setting a critical national goal to improve clinical care of the patient. Which Act am I?

Answer 1

HITECH Act 2009 (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) passed the law of using EHRs by hospitals in U.S. Electronic health records is the record of an individual’s lifetime health information stored electronically. The HITECH Act was enacted under Title XIII of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(ARRA) and this act was signed into law on Feb 17,2009. According to the Washington Post reported the inclusion of "as much as $36.5 billion in spending to create a nationwide network of electronic health records. HITECH is passed so that any physician and hospital that attests to meaningful use must also have performed in HIPAA security risk assessment. This EHR has several benefits and drawbacks listed-

Benefits of EHR- Medical records get well stored, Eliminates transcription costs, Better readability, Ease of data to multiple users, Eliminates medical errors, and better decisions can be taken about patient care, HIPAA compliant

Drawbacks of EHR- doctors and staff need to be trained to use EHR, hacking off the system can occur, time spent converting the paper to electronic data can be consuming, hardware and software needs constant replacement and updating, initial costs of an EHR are high

Thus, HITECH act helps drive the health practices with the latest use EHR technology for effective health care practices. However, has its own set of disadvantages for the hospitals in the USA.