Meaningful Use of Data

¶ … program has the potential to revolutionize the way the healthcare industry on many fronts and has implications for nurses, nursing, national health policy, patient outcomes, and population health associated with the collection and use of Meaningful Use core criteria. The primary objectives that lie at the heart of the system is to improve patient outcomes, safety, efficiencies, patient engagement, improved coordination, and public health outcomes in general among many other objectives.

There are several components that are included in the electronic health records (EHR) initiative and there are also different stages of the implementation (stages 1 and 2). This analysis will provide an overview of the Meaningful Use objectives as well as a discussion about possible inclusions of various criteria that could strengthen the implementation in general. Overview of the Meaningful Use Program The U.S.

government introduced the Meaningful Use program as part of the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, to encourage health care providers to show "meaningful use" of a certified Electronic Health Record (EHR) and in doing so, eligible providers who do so receive incentive payments (Athena Heatlh, N.d.).

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was signed into law on February 17, 2009, to promote the adoption and meaningful use of health information technology (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, N.d.).

The overall aim of the program is to promote widespread adoption of EHR systems in regards to the components of the system that are deemed to be in accordance with the objectives designed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Individual physicians and other eligible health care professionals can each receive up to $44,000 through the Medicare Meaningful Use program or up to $63,750 through the Medicaid Meaningful Use program, depending upon when they begin attesting to the program's requirements (Athena Heatlh, N.d.).

Furthermore, in addition to the incentives, there are also penalties that kick in when providers are not in compliance with the system. For example, providers that do not implement EHR systems for their workflows could be forced to accept a reduced fee schedule for the Medicare services that they provide. The penalties in fee schedules can also increase over time if a provider is not in compliance by the dates outlined in the initiative. Literature Review on EHR Support for electronic health records (EHR) has grown exponentially over recent years.

There are many advantages but also disadvantages associated with the transfer to a digital record keeping system. One advantage is keeping accurate medical histories. In many cases patients themselves cannot remember their full medical histories, or know exactly which treatments they have received, thus having access to an accurate patient history can be one of the critical success factors in a patient's treatment. Thus this is one critical area that can improve the quality of care as well as increase efficiency and effectiveness in healthcare administration.

There are also other advantages to creating databases that can allow for the identification of certain trends and the effectiveness of treatments through data mining. Using the aggregate of the data from local, regional, or even national databases, researchers will be able to spot a number of trends in patients and the effectiveness of treatments across large populations. This has the opportunity to create a number of best practices based on evidence-based research that could dramatically improve treatment options relative to certain treatments.

For example, if a certain antibiotic is showing resistance in a large percentage of a population then local practitioners might be able to choose a different treatment option. There are also many potential advanced uses of EHR that could give doctors access to patient data in real time through cloud technologies. With the technological advancements in information technology, cloud computing provides several opportunities and services to users like storing personal information, accessing various web services for online transactions, online diagnosis systems etc. (Kumar, Babu, Ramesh, Madhura, & Padmavathamma, 2013).

Gaining access to healthcare data is a vital requirement for medical practitioners and pharmaceutical researchers to study characteristics of diseases. In recent years, the proliferation of cloud computing services enables hospitals and institutions to transit their healthcare data to the cloud, which provides ubiquitous data access and on-demand high quality services at a low cost (Lin, Dou, Zhou, & Lui, 2015). The future of EHR could even create more efficiencies and allow patients to be more active in their own treatment plans.

For example, self-caring services are becoming more and more important for our daily life, especially under the urgent situation of global aging. Big data such as massive historical medical records makes it possible for users to have self-caring services, such as to get diagnosis by themselves with similar patients' records (Wang, Chen, & Zhang, 2015). Although there are various symptom checkers and other medical information databases online, the next generation of these technologies could be more personable on a grand level.

For example, patients could be provided access to anonymous but real patient records to determine their options and the potential success rates for different treatments in similar patients with similar conditions. Meaningful Use Stages (Athena Heatlh, N.d.) Meaningful Use Stage 1: data capture and sharing Launched in 2011, Meaningful Use Stage 1 emphasizes proper electronic data capture and data sharing using an EHR technology. Eligible providers can attest to Stage 1 and receive their incentive payment after meeting nine core objectives and one public health objective.

Meaningful Use Stage 2: advanced clinical processes Stage 2 Meaningful Use, which began in 2014, introduces new objectives and measures, as well as higher thresholds, requiring providers to extend EHR capabilities to a larger portion of their patient populations. The recent changes to the Meaningful Use program have Stage 1 and 2 more closely aligned, with both requiring nine core objectives and one public health objective, for attestation.

Meaningful Use Stage 3: improved outcomes Although details have not been finalized, Meaningful Use Stage 3 will aim to simplify the program, drive interoperability between electronic health records, and improve patient outcomes. Based on the current timeline, providers have the option to begin Stage 3 Meaningful Use in 2017, but are not required until 2018. Discussion & Recommendations The Meaningful Use program will require many changes for nurses, nursing, national health policy, patient outcomes, and population health.

It will require that these individuals learn new systems as well as how to cooperate in a more integrated fashion with other health care providers and IT technicians. However, since the rollout is being scheduled in stages, meeting the requirements of the system's criteria should not be too challenging. In stage one, only the most basic of health information is shared and the more rigorous health information exchanges do not begin to ramp up until stage two.

I feel that there would be many beneficial additions for nurses, nursing, monitoring population health,.