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Meaningful Use Legislation and the Impact on Healthcare Organizations
Application 2: Meaningful Use Paper
NURS8210-1, Transforming Nursing and Healthcare through Technology
October 1, 2016
Meaningful Use
In 2009, the government passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act under which the HITEC Act allocated over nineteen billion dollar for the purposes of investing in the healthcare information technology. The Act intends to improve the healthcare system in the United States; therefore, it provided incentives to the institutions that use electronic healthcare records by making meaningful use of the same. Meaningful use implies that the institutions use certified electronic healthcare records technology to improve healthcare while at the same time ensuring the highest standards of privacy of patient information (Sittig & Singh, 2011). This essay will examine the impact of the legal, ethical and financial issues in the successful implementation of the meaningful use legislation.
Legal Issue
The main issue that is raised by the meaningful use legislation is the resultant increased legal responsibility of clinicians. The system comes with computer based audits, which show the people who accessed the system’s information. This is increased beyond the normal paper login system where one cannot tell who logged in last. Hence, liability can be placed on the failures or actions taken by clinicians (Sittig & Singh, 2011).
Ethical Issues
One of the major healthcare concerns of the meaningful legislation is the safety of patient information. This is because if there is increased access to healthcare information then there...