One of the core objectives of the Affordable Care Act is to improve the quality as well as enhance accessibility of healthcare services to all the citizens of the United States at affordable rates. One way of achieving this goal is through implementation and use of the certified Electronic Health Records (Blumenthal, 2009). An EHR refers to the digital process through which all patient’s information is recorded electronically so as to be available to all the approved users whenever it is needed (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2012). The information contained in an EHR includes the medical history of the patient, treatment history, dates which the patient got immunizations and also some results of various laboratory tests that have been carried out as well as diagnoses. The federal government through its various agencies came up with incentives so as to ensure full and fast adoption of EHRs by healthcare organizations.
Such incentives and programs provided by the federal government includes payments made by the Medicare and Medicaid to all healthcare organizations and eligible healthcare professionals that adopt and put into meaningful practice the use of electronic health records that have been certified (Federal government health IT, 2013). These incentives by Medicare and Medicaid have speed up adoption of EHR. Without such incentives being provided by the federal government, many healthcare organizations and eligible physicians would not have implemented the use of EHR because of a number of reasons. One of the key reasons that would have stopped many healthcare organizations from adopting the use of electronic health records is initial costs associated with its implementation. Successful implementation of EHR use needs a lot of resources both in time, money as well as skilled labor. The organizations that have so far adopted the use of EHR were motivated by the fact that Medicare and Medicaid offers financial support to them, this therefore reduces the burden of having to meet the costs associated with EHR adoption by organizations and physicians (Davenport, 2013).
References
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2012). Electronic Health Records. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
David Blumenthal. (2009). Stimulating the Adoption of Health Information Technology. NEJM.
HealthIT. (2013). Information about the EHR Incentive Program and EHR Incentive Payments. Providers & Professionals, HealthIT.gov.
Reid Davenport. (2013). Medicare incentives speed adoption of electronic health records. FCW.
