Introduction
Health IT governance is a procedure that facilitates the practical and efficient utilization of IT in facilitating a healthcare organization’s capacity to attain its operational objectives as well as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) goals. On the other hand, the ACA contains several provisions that aim to enhance better care, minimize health-related costs, and foster increased care access (McIntyre & Song, 2019). The healthcare sector envisioned the need for health information technology (HIT) systems to facilitate the attainment of the ACA’s goals and made significant investments in this particular project. The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Health IT governance’s role in ensuring the maintenance, monitoring, and implementation of the ACA’s requirements.
Improving Quality
Health data governance plays a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency, promptness, and relevance of healthcare facilities’ quality improvement and measurement efforts. Evaluating quality using structured information captured during regular patient care practices helps HIT professionals to distinguish new measurement domains. This approach fosters the aggregation of dynamic quality measures capable of capturing changes through time at different levels, the precise adjustment of their associated risks, the customization of every aggregation level, and the sharing of pertinent outcomes. Feedback from quality assessment processes is typically used to foster clinical practice improvements during service delivery (Kruse & Baine, 2018). Healthcare settings also use HIT to facilitate public reporting and compliance monitoring, for instance, licensure, credentialing, certification, and accreditation.
The utilization of accredited electronic health records (EHR) technologies meaningfully also facilitates the fulfillment of the ACA requirements by minimizing health disparities and enhancing efficiency in operations, patient safety, and healthcare service quality. This approach also fosters high patient and family engagement in their respective health, better care coordination, improved public and populace health, and patient health data protection and privacy (Werder, 2015). Implementing clinical decision support tools by U.S based hospitals has also played a crucial role in facilitating the incorporation of evidence-based research outcomes into clinical operations, thereby bettering care quality.
Minimizing Health-Related Costs
Efficiency-related savings often result in instances where similar work is executed using minimal or fewer resources. Health IT governance has been instrumental in streamlining procedures involved in processing claims, thereby cutting its associated costs by a significant margin and improving turnaround periods considerably (Kruse & Baine, 2018). This approach typically fosters the automation of data gathering and communication procedures while proving episodes associated with the claims; this consequently results in reduced healthcare costs and better patient experiences. The substantial savings related to HIT originate from decreased hospital stays resulting from improved coordination and scheduling and increased safety, and the effective utilization of drugs to minimize incidences related to adverse outcomes. HIT governance has also fostered the integration of financial and administrative data transactions such as payment, the submission of claims, and insurance enrollment with clinical information operations, thereby enhancing efficiency in hospitals’ operations. The minimization of costs related to healthcare consequently fosters the attainment of the ACA stipulations.
Enhancing increased Care Access
The significant adoption of HIT and its meaningful use has also enhanced the effective management of chronic diseases. According to Werder (2015), this strategy has been crucial in fostering providers’ capacity to distinguish patients who require tests and additional services and ensuring consistency during the recording of test results. Furthermore, several patients with chronic disorders currently utilize remote monitoring systems to transmit their vital signs to providers directly from their homes. This has been a common practice, especially following the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic.
Conclusion
Health IT governance plays a crucial role in the fulfillment of the ACA’s objectives through several processes. This approach has made it possible for healthcare providers to adopt the meaningful use of HIT to improve the overall quality of care. The strategy enhances operational efficiencies, patient safety, and reduces health disparities. Furthermore, it contributes to the betterment of care delivery services by facilitating quality computation and improvement initiatives. Significant decreases in healthcare-related costs have also been achieved through HIT governance.
References
Kruse C. S., & Beane, A. (2018). Health information technology continues to show positive effect on medical outcomes: Systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 20(2), 1-10.
McIntyre A, & Song, Z. (2019). The US Affordable Care Act: Reflections and directions at the close of a decade. PLoS Med, 16(2), 1–3.
Werder, M. (2015). Health information technology: A key ingredient of the patient experience. Patient Experience Journa l, 2(1), 143–147. Web.