You are the Chief Operating Officer of your hospital. New federal laws, includin

Question

You are the Chief Operating Officer of your hospital. New federal laws, including the Affordable Care Act, vigorously promote the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR). As a result, your hospital invested in a new EHR system about 6 months ago. The vendor had set up the EHR to auto-populate fields and default with information that is "canned". As a result, your facility has seen a revenue increase of 15% as a result of inflated E&M coding for visits. Since the providers are not doing more work, you suspect the increase billing revenue is a result of this new EHR system filling in fields that may or may not have been actually performed by the provider. What laws or statutes might be violated, and how can this be if the Federal Government is promoting the use of EHRs? in 300 words

Explanation / Answer

Answer: Electronic Health Record has been introduced under the Affordable Care Act in health care sector in order to provide fast and quality service for patient. Patient's are benefitted as they themself can track their status of the test and collect reports through anywhere, as patients are provided by User ID as well as unique password. From billing to report treporting area all sections are benefitted through this EHR system as sample's can be well tracked by providing unique Id's and misplacing or losing of the sample has been reduce.

One mistake which I observed in the above discuss case is the default setting done by vendor which is regarding auto-population of fields that is canned might have increase yhe chance of biasness and from that list few entries of test which are processed or not reported might be included that has increase the chances of revenue increase by 15%. That's why now a days as technology is taking over the health care sector even regular service of the software's is required. We need to verify all the parameters correctly which are critical related to patient before submitting or uploading any results.

The laws which are kept for the protection of EHR service include HITECH Act which is mainly concern about providing quality reports to patient by providing fast service reports.

Some legal concern which can be included with EHR is Liability i.e the problem with the software installation, all health care sector should take the service of EHR through goverment sector vendor because such software's are well tested and chances of leakage of privacy of reports and biasness and wrong entry of reports can be violated. Someone should be appointment continously to verify eavh parameters of the EHR is working properly or not. An IT department should be available 24 X 7 in hospital premises who can give immediate help when your software is not working appropriately.

A back plan should be there for all hospitals and health care sector if sudden sotware issues or hacking or any kind of threat comes during EHR functioning so that patient reporting time should not be delayed.

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