Meaningful Use Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay Paper

Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records
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Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records (EHR)
Meaningful Use (MU) Legislation
Meaningful Use (MU) refers to a program initiated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2010 to promote electronic use in clinical procedure. To motivate clinicians to adopt the regulations, CMS offered incentives and set three stages of implementation. Among the motivations was an award of $ 2 million for a hospital that met the standards of Certified Electronic Health Record Technology (CEHRT) (Charles et al., 2015). The main objectives of MU aim at an improvement in the quality of medical services in terms of its increased access, reduction of cost, and time to get services.
Legal Issues
There is a possibility of a room for errors of malpractice where a clinician may copy and paste a patient’s previous history or even in between different patients. As a result, the patient will not get quality treatment since their history used in prescription were outdated. However, an attorney may use the captured details in a malpractice case if the symptoms captured are those who do not change over time (Balestra, 2017). Furthermore, the system can get hacked hence breaching patient privacy. As a result, the information may act as bait to coerce the patient into acting against their wish to avoid leakage of their health status. Consequently, in such an incident, the patient may find evidence against the physicians in charge.
Financial Issues
The Federal government incurs a lot of costs in the implementation of the program. Moreso, the expenditure goes towards motivation in terms of incentives to the clinical practitioners who abide by the set standards of CEHRT (Balestra, 2017). Besides, the cost of installing the technology equipment in the health facilities further increases the expenditure. Additionally, the hospitals that fail to implement stage 1, according to the standards, end up getting reimbursement pay cut from Medicare, thus limiting their chance of progressing to stage 2 (Adler-Milstein et al., 2015). Consequently, the rate of overall success in the implementation of MU policies reduces.
Ethical Issues
The exclusive use of EHR reduces one on one contact between the patient and the clinicians. In other words, qualified medical practitioners spend more time on data entry than that with the patients. On the other hand, a physician may respond to the MU alerts while attending to an emergency need of a patient. However, if the signals were time-bound, the practitioner will get a fine according to MU regulations since there will be no room for airing factors that led to the failure of response. Finally, some physicians, depending on their doctrines, may have reservations handling members of the LGBT community, thus contravening the MU policy implemented in 2015 that allowed the sexual orientation and gender identity, thereby being non-discriminatory to members of the LGBT community (Cahil et al., 2016). As a result, when the members of the transgender community realize the stigma, they become discouraged from declaring their current sexual orientation. Below are the contributions of the different i...