There are several problems with the current healthcare industry standards for information technology that need to be addressed. Issues such as the lack of electronic health record (EHR) interoperability and user security disrupt meaningful progression which significantly reduces the quality of healthcare. If we don’t figure out smart solutions the industry as a whole will be worse for it and a lot of providers will lose funding as a consequence. One of the main reasons that healthcare providers are pushing for improvement in health information technology (HIT) is that the HITECH act will be entering stage 3 soon and those who do not meet the terms of meaningful use will not receive any financial benefits; Losing out on these incentives would
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This can be done by implementing an EHR that adheres to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. FHIR is an open source standard that is being used by developers to create efficient EHRs that can reliably work with other record systems that use the same standard. It can help healthcare providers fulfill the requirements set by stage 2 meaningful use by providing a framework that developers can build a database for that can provide sufficient data needed for a record access application to gather required data. Although the FHIR standard on its own cannot implement every requirement on its own, it can achieve most of the core objectives that are necessary for fulfilling stage 2 meaningful use. Due to the open source nature of FHIR, it would also be cheaper than most alternatives that structure EHRs in a way that encourages specific types of data being stored in certain ways. The FHIR standard is an excellent way to develop EHRs that demonstrate meaningful use and can improve functionality for interoperability and patient …show more content…
As stated before, government intervention may once again need to occur to get everybody working on the same page; although any solution would obviously need patience and time to enact at least the industry would be taking major steps forward in improving information technology. Full collaboration must be allowed between the government and healthcare providers in order for this progression to occur however and the first step towards this goal would likely require all of the states and territories joining the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration (HISPC) to ensure that EHRs around the country can transmit information reliably. (Stone, 2014) This would allow the collaboration of the entire country rather than a few relative states which would therefore lead to collaboration between vendors to unify under a common goal and build solutions; these solutions would most likely use the FHIR standard due to the low cost of
This can be done by implementing an EHR that adheres to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. FHIR is an open source standard that is being used by developers to create efficient EHRs that can reliably work with other record systems that use the same standard. It can help healthcare providers fulfill the requirements set by stage 2 meaningful use by providing a framework that developers can build a database for that can provide sufficient data needed for a record access application to gather required data. Although the FHIR standard on its own cannot implement every requirement on its own, it can achieve most of the core objectives that are necessary for fulfilling stage 2 meaningful use. Due to the open source nature of FHIR, it would also be cheaper than most alternatives that structure EHRs in a way that encourages specific types of data being stored in certain ways. The FHIR standard is an excellent way to develop EHRs that demonstrate meaningful use and can improve functionality for interoperability and patient …show more content…
As stated before, government intervention may once again need to occur to get everybody working on the same page; although any solution would obviously need patience and time to enact at least the industry would be taking major steps forward in improving information technology. Full collaboration must be allowed between the government and healthcare providers in order for this progression to occur however and the first step towards this goal would likely require all of the states and territories joining the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration (HISPC) to ensure that EHRs around the country can transmit information reliably. (Stone, 2014) This would allow the collaboration of the entire country rather than a few relative states which would therefore lead to collaboration between vendors to unify under a common goal and build solutions; these solutions would most likely use the FHIR standard due to the low cost of