American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Analysis

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was created to stimulate medicine and adopt as well as “meaningfully” use electronic health records within and across health organizations. This was to help improve patient outcomes and accountability, aid in coordination of care, promote effective health management across organizations, and align incentives with good patient and population outcomes.
Medical record keeping has a robust history of promoting patient care. The adoption of EHR’s to be considered and ethical act, patients need for optimal outcomes should be the driving force behind it. It is important for health care personnel must avoid inclinations to game the rules or view attestation as a means to an end. All falsification violates

the moral imperative against lying. It opens the organization and senior officers to audits, fraud charges, and reclamation of funds under the False Claim Act as well as the Deficit Reduction Act. The ethical principle of disruptive justice requires that health care facilities support the greater good.
There are ethical implication of specific criteria for meaningful use. They have sorted the rules into three categories based in purpose which includes electronic extensions of basic clinical charting, requirements promoting patient safety, and patient centered rules. There are other rules that are extensions of basic charting that include recordings of patient demographics, vital signs, listing medication allergies, maintaining problems lists, recording smoking status for patients older than 13 and incorporating lab results into the EHR . There are rules that are required for safety including reminding patients of needed clinical services, transmitting prescriptions to pharmacies electronically, checking medication allergies and drug to drug interactions, implementing computerized physician order entry systems, and reconciling medication among different care settings, implementing drug formulary checks, creating patient registries by condition and creating immunization registries.
I think that “Meaningful Use” is very important as well as relevant to clinical practices. I’ve been to the doctor’s office and sat in an exam room because the doctor forgot about me. I once had a doctor give me Lexapro, which is a SSRI, instead of Levothyroxine, which is a thyroid medication. It is mistakes like this that make it important to have safety rules which has varying levels of success, and electronic recordkeeping will greatly increase the speed, accuracy as well as the ease of analysis of safety data. I do not believe that “meaningful use” is a bureaucratic requirement to spend public dollars on computer systems.