Assignment: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet

Assignment: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet

Assignment: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet

Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet: 21st Century Cures Act

Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in December 2016, the 21st Century Cures Act includes a host of provisions that advance greater interoperability, embracement of electronic health records (EHRs) and speeds up the development of new treatment interventions through a host of methods that include sharing of data (HealthIT.gov, 2021). The provisions also require partnerships among health information exchange systems and health information technology certification requirements that encourage interoperability.

Key provisions

• Data sharing to accelerate drug and device development
• Improving interoperability to enhance access to health information
• Establishment of secure “application program interface” for patients to access information
• Strengths and clarifies aspects of HIPAA law in regards to sharing information on mental health issues
• Help modernization and personalization of health care and encourage increased innovation and
• Support research as well as streamlining organizational systems (Martin, 2020).

Impact of 21st Century Cures Act

System Implementation

• It improves access and flow of health information in healthcare settings
• It enhances sharing of information for effective execution of system-wide decisions in healthcare organizations

Clinical Care

• It drives value specifically based in the level of clinical care provided to patients
• The act also improves interoperability and compliance to HIPAA regulations for clinical care providers in mental health and substance use disorders (Lengyel-Gomez, 2018).

Patient/Provider Interactions

• 21st Century Act provides new tools and resources to help the delivery of best patient care
• Enhances patient experience through improved access to and sharing of information
• Offers outcome measures associated with patient report and functional status

Workflow

• It simplifies the process of sharing information to enhance better workflow
• Allows providers to access information that is critical in effective workflows for patients
• Encourages the use of personal devices and apps to access information (Lye et al., 2018).

Organizational policies and Procedures to Address the Policy

The 21st Century Act requires effective organizational policies and procedures to help its effective implementation. These include:

• Having an information policy to guide the use of the provisions in the act
• Training employees on the significance of the policy
• Increasing patient awareness through effective interactions with providers in the facility

References

HealthIT.gov (2021).  Health IT Legislation.

 https://www.healthit.gov/topic/laws-regulation-and-policy/health-it-legislation

Lengyel-Gomez, B. (2018). 21st Century Cures Act—A Summary.

https://www.himss.org/resources/21st-century-cures-act-summary

Lye, C. T., Forman, H. P., Daniel, J. G., & Krumholz, H. M. (2018). The 21st Century Cures Act

and electronic health records one year later: will patients see the benefits? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 25(9), 1218-1220. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocy065.

Martin, M. (2020). The ethics of emergent health technologies: Implications of the 21st

century cures act for nursing. Policy, Politics, & Nursing Practice, 21(4), 195-201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527154420947028

Policy Regulation Fact Sheet

The selected policy for this assignment brief is the 21^st Century Act of 2016. President Obama signed this act into use in 2016 with the aim of accelerating healthcare research on preventing as well as curing serious health problems. It also sought to accelerate the discovery of new drugs and medical devices for use in addressing emerging health problems. The act also addressed the issue of opioid abuse, as a way of improving the delivery of the mental health services. There was also the push for the enhanced interoperability and adoption of electronic health records for enhanced service provision in the act (Jaffe, 2015).

The 21^st Century Act of 2016 has some implications on system implementation. It increases the need for the adoption of healthcare systems that enable enhanced health information sharing between and among healthcare providers. It also supports the utilization of patient-centered health information technologies such as mobile apps for delivering health care services (Black, Hulkower & Ramanathan, 2018). It however demands the need for the use of language that users easily understand in adopting these patient-centered technologies. Lastly, it promotes the adoption of health information technologies that promote holism in care (Kinney, 2018).

The 21^st Century has some implications on clinical care, patient/provider interactions, and workflow. It increases the need for holism in the provision of mental health services. Patients should be treated as a whole being and not a condition. There is anticipated enhanced patient-provider interactions due to the simplification of language used in telehealth and telemedicine technologies for care. There is also anticipated enhanced information exchange between them due to improved interoperability of the systems. The policy also improves workflow by reducing time spent on making decisions (Paradise, 2018).

One of the organizational policies in place in my organization to address the policy is the use of health information technologies in the provision of care. There is also the use of telehealth and telemedicine to improve quality of health for the patients. Lastly, there is the promotion of holism in care. The focus of care is on the whole needs of the patient and not those related to the disease alone.

References

Black, J. R., Hulkower, R. L., & Ramanathan, T. (2018). Health information blocking: responses under the 21st Century Cures Act. Public Health Reports, 133(5), 610-613.

Jaffe, S. (2015). 21st Century Cures Act progresses through US Congress. The Lancet, 385(9983), 2137-2138.

Kinney, E. D. (2018). 21st Century Cures Act and Medical Device Regulation Departure from Principles or Catching the Wave. American journal of law & medicine, 44(2-3), 269-290.

Paradise, J. (2018). 21st Century Citizen Pharma: The FDA & Patient-Focused Product Development. American Journal of Law & Medicine, 44(2-3), 309-327.

Policy/ Regulation Fact Sheet: MACRA

The Medicare Access and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) Reauthorization Act (MACRA) is a federal policy which provides a new model that reimburses clinician who adequately demonstrate value as opposed to quantity in patient care(CDC, n.d.). The regulation supports informatics and technology integration as it allows providers to access a system-based payment model that rewards efficiency and high-value patient care (AANP, 2018). The main purpose of MACRA is to change payment models for Medicare to quality based and not quantity based.

As a professional nurse, you are expected to use your knowledge and skills to provide patient care. On occasion, you will be expected to share your knowledge.

With changing technology and regulations designed to keep up, there is usually a need to share information and expertise to inform colleagues, leadership, patients, and other stakeholders.

In this Assignment, you will research a recent nursing informatics-related healthcare policy and present the findings in the form of a fact sheet designed to inform and educate.

To Get Ready:

Examine the resources on healthcare policy and regulatory/legislative issues pertaining to health and nursing informatics.
Consider the nurse informaticist’s role in ensuring that a healthcare organization complies with various policies and regulations, such as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA).
Select one health or nursing informatics policy or regulation (within the last 5 years) for further investigation.

The Big Data has significant benefits as well as challenges for the healthcare organizations. One of the benefits of the Big Data is that it provides health organizations and health care providers with real time data. Health organizations and healthcare providers benefit from real time data in a number of ways. Firstly, health organizations obtain up-to-data on any errors in their systems, enabling them to trouble shoot the errors before they can affect adversely the outcomes of care. Real time data from the Big Data therefore saves time, money, and resources that could have been used in responding to the threats of the errors (Kruse et al., 2016). The Big Data also provides real time information on the trends and needs of the consumers of healthcare services. Health organizations can use this information to develop products and services that match the prioritized and perceived needs of their consumers. Real time data also benefits healthcare providers in that they can use it to make informed decisions on the care that the patients need and ways of meeting them (Pramanik et al., 2017).

Despite the above benefits, Big Data is associated with some challenges. One of them is data privacy. The Big Data relies on the use of vast amount of data from different sources for organizational benefit. The data is however at a risk of being used for other purposes that are not meaningful. There is also the risk of data loss from an organization to third parties threatening data privacy and confidentiality. Several strategies have been developed to address the risks associated with the Big Data on healthcare. One of them is the development of data protection and use guidelines for health organizations to ensure meaningful use of health data. There is also the use of provider training to ensure that healthcare providers have adequate knowledge and skills on the promotion of data integrity (Snyder & Zhou, 2019). Therefore, a consistent use of these strategies promotes safe use of the Big Data in health.

References

Kruse, C. S., Goswamy, R., Raval, Y. J., & Marawi, S. (2016). Challenges and opportunities of big data in health care: A systematic review. JMIR Medical Informatics, 4(4), e38.

Pramanik, M. I., Lau, R. Y., Demirkan, H., & Azad, M. A. K. (2017). Smart health: Big data enabled health paradigm within smart cities. Expert Systems with Applications, 87, 370–383.

Snyder, M., & Zhou, W. (2019). Big data and health. The Lancet Digital Health, 1(6), e252–e254.

The regulation establishes three critical changes on provider payments by Medicare. These include:

• Payment to participating providers based on effectiveness and quality of the patient care offered.
• Allows the combination of current reporting programs to a new model.
• It replaced the Sustainable Growth Rate Formula
• Through MACRA, Medicare cards protect patients’ financial and personal information and allow them to access from private facilities (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017).
• The act also protects individuals’ federal health care benefits and service payments ensuring that there is no unauthorized access to such information.

Impact of MACRA on System Implementation

• The policy enhances management and care of information; especially personal health and financial information and data of patients accessing the system (HealthIT.gov., 2018b).
• The policy ensures that systems are optimized to enhance privacy, confidentiality, and security.

Impact on Clinical Care

• The policy impacts clinical care by focusing on value provision for patients and not volume for providers.

Patient and Provider Interactions

• The policy provider new avenues and resources for providers and patients to interact and ensure that they offer best care through patient input and involvement.
• The policy improves patient experience in health facilities as they engage more with providers.
• The policy offers outcome measures associated with patient reporting and functional abilities or status.

Workflow

• MACRA lowers clinician burden as it enhances efficiency.
• MACRA effectively simplifies the scoring process to improve workflow for providers and better interactions for patients.

Organizational Policies and Procedures in Place to align with MACRA Policy

• MACRA is a fundamental component of our organization’s efforts to enhance quality care based on the existing frameworks and policies like Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).
• The use of MIPS allows providers to earn payment based on their value addition or performance in the organization (AANP, 2018). Secondly, MACRA ensures that there is effective care coordination among the different providers. The policy ensures that activities within an organization offer meaningful use to both providers and patients.

References

American Association of Nurse Practitioners. (AANP) (2018). MACRA/MIPS: The transition

from fee-for-service to quality-based reimbursement. https://www.aanp.org/legislation-regulation/federal-legislation/macra-s-quality-payment-program

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CDC) (n.d.). MACRA.

https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality-initiatives-patient-assessment-instruments/value-based-programs/macra-mips-and-apms/macra-mips-and-apms.html

Laureate Education (Producer). (2018). Health Informatics & Population Health Analytics:

Privacy, Security, and Ethics [Video file]. Baltimore, MD: Author

HealthIT.gov. (2018b). Meaningful use and MACRA.

https://www.healthit.gov/topic/meaningful-use-and-macra/meaningful-use-and-macra

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2017). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge

            (4th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

The Project: (1 page)

Create a one-page fact sheet that your healthcare organization could use to explain the health or nursing informatics policy/regulation you chose. Your fact sheet should include the following information:

Click here to ORDER an A++ paper from our Verified MASTERS and DOCTORATE WRITERS: Assignment: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet

Explain the policy or regulation you chose in general terms.
Consider the effect of the policy or regulation you chose on system implementation.
Consider the effect of the policy or regulation you chose on clinical care, patient/provider interactions, and workflow.
Highlight organizational policies and procedures that are/will be in place at your healthcare organization to address the policy or regulation that you chose. Make your points clear.

References:

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2017). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (4th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

• Chapter 8, “Legislative Aspects of Nursing Informatics: HITECH and HIPAA” (pp. 145–166)

https://www.aanp.org/legislation-regulation/federal-legislation/macra-s-quality-payment-program

https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality-initiatives-patient-assessment-

instruments/value-based-programs/macra-mips-and-apms/macra-mips-and-apms.html

https://www.healthit.gov/topic/laws-regulation-and-policy/health-it-legislation

https://www.healthit.gov/topic/meaningful-use-and-macra/meaningful-use-and-

macra

https://www.hhs.gov/regulations/index.html

Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet

Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act is the policy I’ve chosen (HITECH). (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2017) HITECH enacts the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), thereby generating incentives for healthcare information technology. For instance, it introduced incentives to encourage providers to use electronic health record systems. The primary purpose of HITECH was to broaden the breadth of security and privacy as well as the transmission of electronically protected health information (Nair & Dreyfus, 2018). The impact of HITECH on system implementation is an increase in the usage of electronic health records and an improvement in the quality and efficiency of patient treatment HITECH enhanced the usage of electronic health records as a result.

The HITECH Act sought to encourage healthcare practitioners to use health record systems by encouraging the tracking and archiving of patients’ healthcare histories. (Adler- Milstein &Jha, 2017) The HITECH Act’s impact on clinical care includes raising the rate of adoption of electronic health records, hence assisting in successfully responding to market pressure based on healthcare practices. The HITECH Act’s influence on providers’ interactions involves the transmission of patient health information, hence increasing the likelihood of patients receiving copies of their medical or health records.
The necessary procedures and policies for implementing the HITECH Act include the supply of copies of medical records for information access. Patients should have access to retrieval of retained information (Laureate Education, 2018). In addition, recognizing the repercussions of not having a BAA is required to conceal a breach of the HITECH regulations. Notification of breach is an additional obligation that enables individuals to three pieces of data are included in a data breach (Koczkodaj et al., 2019). Organizations must be aware of the penalties associated with HITECH Act violations.

References

Adler-Milstein, J., & Jha, A. K. (2017). The HITECH Act significantly increased hospital usage of electronic health records. 36(8) Health Affairs, 1416-1422.
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.1651
Koczkodaj, W. W., Masiak, J., Mazurek, M., Strzałka, D., & Zabrodskii, P. F. (2019). The data from the Office of Civil Rights demonstrates massive health record breaches. 278 Iranian Journal of Public Health, vol. 48, no. 2 Laureate Education is the producer of https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc6556182 (2018). Privacy, Security, and Ethics in Health Informatics and Population Health Analytics [Video file]. Author, Baltimore, Maryland.
McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2017). Nursing informatics and the knowledge foundation (4th ed.). Burlington, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Learning.
Nair, A., & Dreyfus, D. (2018). Meaningful use of information technology in healthcare as an example of technology alignment in the face of regulatory changes. 110, 42-51, International Journal of Medical Informatics.
https://doi

The inclusion of nurses in the systems development life cycle discussions

The inclusion of nurses in the systems of the life cycle (SDLC) is important for this aspect of nursing is the backbone of healthcare. Nurses are providers of care for twelve hours a day and provide support that is imperative to patients and families of all aspects of care by assessing, diagnosing, treating, maintaining health statuses, and preventing illness (Dai et al., 2021). This system of the development of life can help needs to be met. One of these needs should be the use of an IT specialist to focus on providing quality care to their patients. Each stage of the SDLC should involve nurses when implementing new health technology systems for if forgotten, problems and inconveniences can occur.

The SDLC contains five phases: Requirement elicitation, system analysis, system design, implementation, and acceptance testing. This process requires time management and sometimes can lead to errors in healthcare organizations, i.e. nurses not being a part of the system analysis phased (Dai et al., 2021). The budget and organizational standards can be affected if the requirement elicitation phase isn’t confronted or organized.

Problems that can occur in the SDLC process include malfunction in testing and flexibility with nurses and families and other participants in healthcare systems. Examples of problems at system analysis stage include not meeting requirements of nurses that should be met, and physicians not being consulted for their requirements because they are not included in SDLC (Gava et al., 2020). Problems in the phase design include not meeting nursing requirements in the system design. Mis-including nurses in SDLC can lead to disruption and damage to the health system due to the amount of knowledge and experience that nurse obtain.

Nurses have mastered the art of implementation through adequate training to be successful, and through this method they can also become stakeholders. It is important to include nurses in the SDLC process because they are the ones providing care for patients, their families and the organizations (Houghton et al., 2017). Nurses are an average one half of the workforce, and it is important for nurses to be involved in this stage of the IT system life cycle, for nurses utilize this system the most. The SDLC and IT has affected nurses practice by changing the way nurses work to live a healthier life. IT helps them to provide better care to patients (Joensuu & Saarinen, 2017). SDLC ensures a quality component and implements technology, documentation, and training for employees that is important for nursing practice. Implementing new systems could lead to a disruption of practice if participants are not aware of why implementations are beneficial.

The potential impacts of being included the decision-making process includes improved quality of care, improved the visibility of care the patient receives and better communication within the health care team (Zabdyr-Jamróz, 2021). When nurses’ needs are being met, nurses will feel valued knowing that they have a voice. The role of nurses in IT includes being a knowledge expert, having communication skill, and being a great business partner. It is important for nurses to be a part of the decision-making process by participating in changes that are made in the workplace.

References

Boisjoly, G., & Yengoh, G. T. (2017). Opening the door to social equity: local and participatory approaches to transportation planning in Montreal. European Transport Research Review, 9(3), 1-21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12544-017-0258-4

Dai, J., Ren, X., Wu, P., Wang, X., Jiang, L., Bian, H., Ren, L., & Wu, C. (2021). Construction of exchange integrated information chain management model leading by information nurse for large instrument and equipment in operating room. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 21, 1-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01417-w

Gava, O., Bartolini, F., Venturi, F., Brunori, G., & Pardossi, A. (2020). Improving Policy Evidence Base for Agricultural Sustainability and Food Security: A Content Analysis of Life Cycle Assessment Research. Sustainability, 12(3), 1033. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su12031033

Houghton, S. C., Manson, J. E., Whitcomb, B. W., Hankinson, S. E., Troy, L. M., Bigelow, C., & Bertone-Johnson, E. (2017). Intake of dietary fat and fat subtypes and risk of premenstrual syndrome in the Nurses’ Health Study II. The British Journal of Nutrition, 118(10), 849-857. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007114517002690

Joensuu, K., & Saarinen, M. (2017). Applying soil quality indicators in the context of life cycle assessment in a Finnish case study. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 22(9), 1339-1353. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11367-016-1247-x

Zabdyr-Jamróz Michał. (2021). “All they want is money!” The deliberative theory approach to the inclusion of nurses’ self-interests in the 2016 strike in the Children’s Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw. Social Theory & Health, 19(1), 68-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41285-019-00123-y

.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2017.11.012

Permalink: https://nursingmill.blog/assignment-polic…ation-fact-sheet/ ‎ to address the policy or regulation selected are vague and inaccurate, or are missing.

Written Expression and Formatting – Paragraph Development and Organization:

I work on a behavioral health unit as well. Our information technology (IT) department is always making changes to our computer program. Often, changes and updates are made without notifying the floor nurses. For example, I worked Wednesday, and the flow of the graphics in the documentation program was the same as usual. However, the next day, the program changed significantly. I checked my e-mail and education portal for u