There are thoughts and facts about CMS incentivizing interoperability. I have been a nurse for around thirty years, and I saw the practice without electronic health records (EHRs). I must say that the EHR system helped a lot in managing charts, as it was an absolute disaster trying to acquire relevant patient history without EHRs. Today, however, interoperability has not reached the desired level in the US. According to Shull (2019), adopting an EHR system that can be shared among hospitals is associated with significant difficulties. However, without such interoperability, nurses cannot get the information they need to provide adequate care. It is most felt in emergency care when doctors and nurses need to make fast decisions without the ability to talk to the patient. Therefore, I believe that CMS’s incentives to promote interoperability are crucial.
There are thoughts about quality control and hospitals and how CMS’s incentives affected your procedures before circumcision. In operating sites, time-out protocols have become widely accepted for a wide variety of reasons. CMS’s policy for not paying for the incorrect procedure was one of them. Haugen et al. (2013) state that medical personnel often avoid using the time-out protocol because they believe that “near misses” will not happen to them. However, adverse events that happen in a hospital often act as wake-up calls for all the personnel to start following the time-out protocol (Haugen et al., 2013). In my practice, I witnessed several “near misses,” which usually led to significant changes in the quality assurance policies of the hospital and increased stress on all the personnel.
Reference
Haugen, A. S., Murugesh, S., Haaverstad, R., Eide, G. E., & Søfteland, E. (2013). A survey of surgical team members’ perceptions of near misses and attitudes towards Time Out protocols. BMC surgery, 13(1), 1-8.