A Brief Summary of the HITECH Act for new medical practices

Guest post by: Irene Froehlich
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10 Tips For Growing Your Health IT Strategy - By Irene Froehlich

The HITECH Act sets out some formidable adoption goals for "Meaningful Use" of electronic health records and electronic prescribing. Luckily, it's the new medical practice that may be best suited to rise to the occasion! A quick summary of the HITECH Act's chief objectives provides some context to explain why.

Improved care for patient populations

The new practice sets out its shingle with the promise to deliver the best patient-centered care available, giving equal attention to each individual patient. An admirable goal, but what the HITECH Act really aims to achieve is more clarity on persistent health issues within entire populations of patients. The start up medical practice that begins electronic record-keeping and electronic prescribing right away, as opposed to building groaning stacks of paper files, is primed to play an important role here.

For example, e-prescribing technology aggregates individual patient medication histories, which can eventually be examined to better understand the overall effects of certain medications on patients within a particular demographic. For purposes of a concise HITECH Act summary, this is just one example of patient population health care, but there are many more.

Accelerated use of electronic prescribing

At least four of the HITECH Act's core Meaningful Use of EHR objectives are related to electronic prescribing; thus, it's prominent standing in our HITECH Act summary. Doctors in new medical practices that begin electronic prescribing right away may never know what they're saving in time and possibly reduced medical liability. Suffice it to say that the "old way" of paper-based prescribing can be a time-consuming hunt for any number of details needed to safely authorize a prescription, from a patient's drug allergies, to proper dosage amount and strength.

The right e-prescribing solution includes all of the above, and even insurance formulary coverage and industry alerts of drug recalls. In fact, some solutions that include such e-prescribing alerts allow a doctor to quickly look up every patient who is taking the recalled drug. Moving on to the final HITECH objective in our summary...

Patient access to medical records

This isn't necessarily a top goal for doctors, but it's worth including in this summary as it's a primary HITECH objective - and something patients have requested for years. Some solutions do allow doctors to restrict patient access to certain parts of their medical records. If the solution includes e-prescribing, for example, patients might be able to view their medication histories, but not all the notes taken down by the doctor. At any rate, new practices may be more receptive to patient access to records, as many doctors in these practices have grown up in the "Information Age." And, they've also grown up with laptops, mobile phones, and PCs. Electronic prescribing and health records? Piece of cake!

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About the Author: Irene Froehlich

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Irene Froehlich has a unique business perspective as she has been the head of the DrFirst marketing department for more than 11 years. DrFirst began in 2000 by offering e-prescribing solutions to physicians and has grown to provide physicians with options for meeting Meaningful Use criteria and qualifying for federal incentive payments. DrFirst was bootstrapped from day one and successfully navigated the dot com bust which provided numerous challenges that Irene overcame, growing the DrFirst brand into an industry defining company that shows year over year growth. In such a unique market as health IT, Irene has successfully positioned DrFirst as a company that gives physicians options for exhibiting meaningful use of EHR - setting DrFirst apart from the competition. Irene's experience with DrFirst as a start-up, to present day as a booming small business affords her a unique perspective focused on results and minimizing cost. You can follow Irene's posts on the DrFirst blog at blog.drfirst.com and at www.twitter.com/DrFirst.
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