The key focus of this paper will focus on house representative Pierluisi Pedro who serves in the congress as a representative of Puerto Rico. The bill that he introduced in the house is the Puerto Rico Hospital HITECH Amendments Act of 2015 114th Congress (2015-2016) (Congress.Gov. (2015). This bill was introduced into the house on the 3rd of March 2015 by the above representative as an amendment to the Social Security Act. This bill seeks to have the application of Medicare health information technology for economic and clinical health act to hospitals in this part of the country. The objectives of this move are to enable these hospitals to adopt and make use of electronic health records in the operations of hospitals (Blechman, 2014).
The specific part of hospitals this Act targets is the acute care setting. Patients’ healthcare costs are taken care of by the Medicare inpatient payment system (Rahman et al., 2014). The key terms included in this bill include; health and facilities and institutions, computers and information technology, health information, and health records, and Medicare in the Caribbean area of the United States. Currently, the healthcare bill has been read twice and forwarded to the committee on finance for further considerations. The progress concerning this bill so far are positive in the sense that other representatives are much focused in passing the bill through the whole process because of the advantages that are associated with it. The affiliate bills to this one include; the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 and the Improving the Treatment of the U.S. Territories under Federal Health Programs Act of 2015 which have already been signed into law on and are currently operating.
The ethical foundations associated with this bill are founded on the fact that, electronic health records have got shortcomings as far the privacy of the patients using them is concerned. There have been concerns regarding the way the health information of patients who are treated by this method. A point to note is that since electronic health records can be easily accessed by a vast number of healthcare providers, it makes it easy for other parties who should not be involved in this treatment process to access the patient’s information. This is because there haven’t been any provisions put in place to control the accessibility of this information. As such, there are chances that criminals may use such information to commit fraud which will be an infringement of the rights of the patient. From this perspective, therefore, a case of ethical concerns is visible. The major legal issue under this bill dwells on the fact that having a clear distinction between who should or should not be included in the Medicare system of insurance cover presents of unfairness. The middle-income earners who are neither too poor nor too rich to be included in this plan find it challenging to access the benefits that may be brought forward by this bill.
References
Bernat, J. L. (2013). Ethical and quality pitfalls in electronic health records.Neurology, 80(11), 1057-1061.
Blechman, E. (2014). Electronic Health Records U.S. Patent Application No. 14/588,304.
Congress.Gov. (2015). All Info - H.R.1225 - 114th Congress (2015-2016): Puerto Rico Hospital HITECH Amendments Act of 2015 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1225/all-info#
Patrick, H., & Conway, M. D. (2015). Guiding Principles for Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation Model Evaluations.
Rahman, M., Gozalo, P., Tyler, D., Grabowski, D. C., Trivedi, A., & Mor, V. (2014). Dual eligibility, selection of skilled nursing facility, and length of Medicare paid postacute stay. Medical Care Research and Review, 1077558714533824.
