¶ … 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...

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, &…