Quality In Health Care

In today’s society, the accuracy of health information, the availability of health records, and the professional resources in which one live are vital in decision making for health conditions. Meaningful Use (MU) is a program developed by CMS Medicare and Medicaid that awards, incentives in the health care industry in which the certified electronic health records (EHRs) are used to improve patient care (Practice Fusion, 2016). These incentives are for professionals that care for about 30% of their adult patient volume or 20% of their children’s volume for Medicare and Medicaid patients (CMS, 2016). In addition, adjusting from paper charts to electronic charts of patient’s information is beneficial for MU. Furthermore, the American

In the United States alone there are 98,000 deaths per year caused by low quality health care (Ignatavicius & Workman, 2013, pg. 2). This statistic is disturbing because the errors that resulted in death were errors that were preventable. The intent of this chapter is to bring awareness to health care providers that are able to make a change in the quality of health care. In current practice patients are subjected to medication errors, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, and poor care provided due to racial, ethical, or low-income factors.

Electronic health records can provide many benefits for providers and their patients, but the benefits depend on how they 're used. Meaningful use is the set of standards defined by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Incentive Programs that governs the use of electronic health records and allows eligible providers and hospitals to earn incentive payments by meeting specific criteria. The goal of meaningful use is to promote the spread of electronic health records to improve health care in the United States. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provides the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) with the authority to establish

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 identified three main components of meaningful use: the use of a certified EHR in a meaningful manner, electronic exchange of health information to improve quality of care, and the use of technology to submit clinical outcomes and quality measures (Heath Resources and Service Administration, n.d.). ARRA includes many measures to modernize our nation’s infrastructure, with the “Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act” being an example. The HITECH Act is an effort led by Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS) in support of electronic health records and meaningful use (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC 2016). According to Galbraith (2013), the HITECH Act aims to promote the use of EHRs by providing over $27 billion in monetary incentives for health care providers that become “meaningful users”. CMS uses these core objectives to determine if a health care provider has satisfied meaningful use and is eligible to receive financial incentives (Galbraith, 2013).

A significant investment to encourage the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) by healthcare providers was made by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The EHR Incentive Program, which financially rewards providers for using EHRs and meeting all CMS program requirements, was launched by CMS in the year 2011. All healthcare providers (private or public) are required to adopt and demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ of electronic health records for maintaining their existing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement levels (Cite). A set of penalties for healthcare providers who fail to meet the deadline have already been defined by the U.S. government. Healthcare providers failing to introduce EHR systems by the year 2015 will experience a one percent reduction in Medicare reimbursements in that year, a two percent reduction in the year 2016, a three percent reduction in the year 2017, followed by a reduction of up to a 95 percent reduction in reimbursements over a period of

The Institute of Medicine released a report in 1999 titled To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health Care System concerning the number of medical error related deaths. The report states that between 44,000 and 98,000 medical error related deaths occur each year in hospitals across the country (Kohn, L. T., Corrigan, J., & Donaldson, M. S., 2000) In response to this report, the Institute of Medicine released Crossing the Quality Chasm: Health: A New Health Care System for the 21st Century that outlines six aims for the future of the healthcare system: safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, equitable (Institute of Medicine, 2001). These aims set to establish the quality of healthcare across the country. Quality is defined by the Institute of Medicine as ““the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge” (2001).

The quality of care In the United States Health Care System, unlike a lot of people’s perceptions, is not the best in the world. In fact, Rose Ann DeMoro, the Executive Director of National Nurses United, Which happens to be the nation’s largest professional association and union for registered nurses, wrote in “How US Private Insurance Healthcare is Failing,” “A study published [in June 2011] from the university of Washington in collaboration with researchers at Imperial College London found life expectancy rates in eighty percent of US counties were fare behind the standard set in the top ten nations” (DeMoro 2).Also, in a study shown in “Forbes” America’s quality of care ranked fifth out of eleven industrial nations: Australia, Canada,

The goal in healthcare today is to achieve better patient outcomes. Technology is changing daily that affects how patient care is provided. As the world around us continues to move into a more advanced technology based healthcare system incentives are offered to qualifying healthcare entities, provided they are utilizing approved health information technology (IT) to comply with standards set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) (Jones, Rudin, Perry, & Shekelle, 2014). Standards such as meaningful use help ensure with the use of electronic health records (EHR) that patients are receiving quality care (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], n.d.). This paper will define and discuss the importance and implications of meaningful use relating to healthcare. Several key points will be discussed including an overview of meaningful use, analysis, further recommendations and a conclusion.

The Institute of Medicine of 2001, states numerous areas where healthcare is failing patients, stating delivery of care is often overly complex and uncoordinated, leading to a slowdown in care rather than improved efficiency in regards to patient safety (Institute of Medicine, 2001). To account for the incommodious system, the Institute of Medicine discusses in a health policy review released titled Crossing the Quality Chasm: A new Health System for the 21st Century. six aims for improvement of quality. The six aims for improvement are built around the core of healthcare to be built around safety, effectiveness, timeliness, efficiency, equitable and patient centeredness (Institute of Medicine, 2001). A healthcare system that achieves gains in these areas would be better off at meeting patient needs according to the Crossing the Quality Chasm review.

The organization should look at what was preform in the visit and should enter the missing information as soon as possible. The data quality and consistency are essential to ensure the safety of communication delivering patient health services and organization of care and reporting. Assessing the quality and consistency of the data requires data standards. The short-term practice provides professional health information with a clear understanding of data standards as a tool to enable interoperability and promote the quality of the data. Some of the problem with having poor-quality can be that by not informing or writing the right information on the patient chart on the same date of the visit it can make you responsible for what had happened

Quality of care has always been a concern in the U.S. health care system. Although great strides have been made to improve the quality of care delivered, many critics still believe that the United States has a long way to go before truly delivering uniform quality care.

Health care quality has made vast improvements in the last several decades and continues to improve as a stronger emphasis has been placed in this sector with our current health care reform. Consumers now have access to quality report cards on providers and the health care systems that can easily be obtained over the internet. Shultz & Young (2014) argue that providers of yesteryear purposely created mysteriousness in health care resulting in patients blindly following their treatments despite the lack of clinical evidence that supported the treatment. Current consumers are more educated on disease processes and the performance of providers and hospitals which has resulted in a greater demand for higher quality.

Health care is rapidly changing, especially in the uncertain economic times. With that being said, companies should continually look to their processes and procedures and update as needed to ensure they are of the best practice, and to keep the competitive advantage (Yarmohammadian, Ebrahimipour, & Doosty, 2014). Due to an emphasis placed on value-based care, there has been a greater focus on quality improvement measures (Margolis, Mackey, Sarwar, & Fintelmann, 2015). Organizations are looking for ways to improve the overall patient outcome while avoiding adding unnecessary costs. However, because there are many different criteria for quality, and it is constantly changing, the quality improvement measures should be continuous (Goetsch

Instead of using paper based records, technology allows physicians to use the electronic medical record (EMR) that improves the quality of programs. By using the EMR, this is not easy nor is it low cost. Physicians’ have to use this method as their daily task. There are some barriers that has been identified with the use of the EMR by the physicians we will discuss. There will be some suggestions made that might can help the policy interventions to overcome the barriers. This will include the support system of work/practice including electronic clinical data exchange, and financial rewards for quality improvement. (Sim, 2004)

As a graduate student offering health care administration, one of the key issues relevant to this field is managed care and quality care. Most of the concerns for the last several decades focused on the cost of increase in health care delivery. Focus during this age was on physician patient relationship dependence; where services provided were based on ‘fee for services’ or what is called an unmanaged or traditional form of health care delivery. With this system, patients were charged based on the nature of sickness including hours spent. Because the system was a source of income to physicians, they inclined to spend quality time giving quality care to achieve a positive result if not negative using effective evidence based system (where patients were allowed to bring to counter their own personal preference and unique concerns as well as expectations which includes values). But the question still remains that, how many people were able to afford this kind of health cost? Obviously the average and the unemployed couldn’t afford and this became a burden for the public, because the structure was favoring only the rich in terms of cost and quality of care. The continuity of this issue (unmanaged care) made America one of the highest health care costs in the world with about 60% to 100% higher than most other countries because only few people could purchase it (health cost). And as those costs approached, it then exceeded to 14% overall economic output, thus increasing pressure