Healthcare costs increase is the significant drawback of the technological progress and services’ quality improvement. Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH), enacted in 2009, was established to help healthcare organizations regulate and optimize the services’ safety and efficiency by IT and electronic devices implementation (Bodenheimer & Grumbach, 2020). The HITECH and the related programs benefit patient outcomes as they include options to access the data quickly, track the clients’ health and treatment with fewer resources, and accurately register paid procedures. This paper aims to discuss the issue of cost control in modern health care and explain how technology can be utilized to address the challenge.
Maintaining balance in the cost of healthcare and the novelties technological improvement offers to the industry is a significant challenge because lowering the accessibly of services makes their innovativeness needless. Treatment tends to be complicated to calculate their price, patients face the demand for re-doing the examinations and procedures if they change a hospital, and the insurance coverage conditions vary. Consequently, IT integration became one of the most crucial assistants in optimizing the costs due to its options to store and share clients’ records and help them track their conditions with fewer expenses (Adler-Milstein et al., 2017). Furthermore, the COVID-19 outbreak caused the Telehealth services to develop, and technologies assisted in decreasing the number of visits without severe patient outcomes.
The HITECH provision released in 2009 provided healthcare organizations with a right to implement health IT to optimize costs and enhance the quality and safety of treatment. The policy provision included using electronic recording systems that could be used by physicians, nursing practitioners, and patients. Indeed, the HITECH goals are to optimize the coordination of services among the organizations, engage clients in their care, make the treatment more cost-efficient, and increase insurance coverage accuracy (Gettinger & Zayas-Cabán, 2021). Passing the Act 12 years ago helped policymakers develop an environment where novel technologies are being implemented without significant cost increase and establish programs that regulate public and private insurance coverage effectiveness.
The significant challenge to containing the costs of healthcare services is the demand for maintaining accessibility while improving the quality of care through novel technologies implementation. The issue is urgent in the US due to the imbalance of private and public financing, where the former can cause rapid development through innovation, making the overall care more costly for the citizens (Gettinger & Zayas-Cabán, 2021). Consequently, the policies and acts such as HITECH help to address the challenge through optimizing and equalizing the services among healthcare organizations nationwide. Technological progress is crucial for improving the quality of treatment and engaging the patients in their care; thus, legislators need to create a strategy to implement the novelties without lowering the affordability for an average citizen.
The HITECH Act revealed its usefulness during the last 12 years because it enabled the organizations to move forward and make technology their daily assistant. Furthermore, the programs established under the provision addressed the challenge of achieving a balance between quality improvement through innovations and the costs of care (Bodenheimer & Grumbach, 2020). For instance, promoting and setting the electronic health record (EHR) systems in hospitals helped reveal the issues that lowered the cost efficiency and create technologies to address them (Reisman, 2017). Policymakers’ actions are correct, and most healthcare providers would agree with them because the reform initiatives are necessary for addressing the issues and achieving the balance in the quality and access to the industry. The valuable insight to consider is that IT’s collaboration with hospitals has already become a significant part of treatment, and HITECH is critical for maintaining the safety and usefulness of the novel implementations.
The challenge to containing the costs of healthcare services is urgent and enables the policymakers to develop, establish, and promote such regulations as the HITECH Act. The continuous need to improve the quality of care through novel technologies causes the costs’ increase, which must be controlled. The use of IT helped the facilities to create networks of data that optimized the services, reduced the price of treatment, and engaged the patients in their care.
References
Adler-Milstein, J., Holmgren, A. J., Kralovec, P., Worzala, C., Searcy, T., & Patel, V. (2017). Electronic health record adoption in US hospitals: The emergence of a digital “advanced use” divide. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 24(6), 1142-1148. Web.
Biancone, P., Secinaro, S., Brescia, V., & Calandra, D. (2019). Management of open innovation in healthcare for cost accounting using EHR. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 5(4), 99. Web.
Bodenheimer, T., & Grumbach, K. (2020). Understanding health policy: A clinical approach (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
Gettinger, A., & Zayas-Cabán, T. (2021). HITECH to 21st century cures: Clinician burden and evolving health IT policy. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 28(5), 1022-1025. Web.
Reisman, M. (2017). EHRs: The challenge of making electronic data usable and interoperable. Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 42(9), 572. Web.