The HITECH Act generally belongs to a broader health information technology (HIT) concept. HIT has three aspects defined as its primary purposes: provide better care, make the care affordable, and pursue healthy populations and communities (McBride & Tietze, 2018). In this context, the HITECH Act contributes to the technological transformation of the healthcare delivery system, particularly in effective and efficient HIT deployment and meaningful use.
Regarding system implementation, the HITECH Act is responsible for promoting, adopting, and meaningfully using the HIT. In particular, it focuses on HIT assistance, college programs that offer HIT training, and grants that support the associated research (McBride & Tietze, 2018). It also solidifies the stages of meaningful use to ensure sufficient infrastructure and information for positive outcomes. In other words, not only does HITECH Act foster technological implementation, but it also educates medical personnel on its use and maintenance.
Driven by the HITECH Act, clinical care has registered shifts toward using patient portals and electronic health records (EHR) systems. For instance, there is a requirement for the number of patients that have to be engaged by the healthcare provider through an online portal or their personal EHR (Sharma, 2018). Apart from that, the meaningful use proliferated by the HITECH Act causes various workflow alterations. For example, it demands that 35% of the patients be notified by a secure message via EHR or patient portal following their meeting with the provider of discharge from a hospital (Sharma, 2018). These requirements impose a widespread implementation of technological solutions.
The healthcare organization chosen for this assignment is the Miami Children’s Hospital. In the framework of the HITECH Act, the hospital targets patient-provider engagement in terms of intensifying patient portal use. A particular example of this procedure is deploying a mobile self-service patient engagement application (Bao et al., 2020). According to Bao et al. (2020), it “was associated with significant improvements in overall patient satisfaction, utilization, and medication adherence, and increased patient engagement from 8% to 80%” (p. 716). Understandably, such a positive outcome can not be dismissed or underestimated.
References
Bao, C., Singh, H., Meyer, B., Kirksey, K., & Bardhan, I. (2020). Patient-provider engagement and its impact on health outcomes: A longitudinal study of patient portal use. MIS Quarterly, 44(2), 699-723. Web.
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2018). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse: Patient safety, quality, outcomes, and interprofessionalism (2nd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.
Sharma, D. (2018). Effects of meaningful use requirements: Performance assessment of acute care hospitals based on the clinical outcomes of care. Central Michigan University.