Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet
A Sample Answer For the Assignment: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet
Title: Policy/Regulation Fact Sheet
Policy Regulation Fact Sheet
The selected policy is HIPAA improvement policy adopted in 2018. In 2018, the former president, Trump announced the introduction of MyHealthEData to the HIPAA regulations. The policy aimed at providing patients access to their insurance claims information as well as electronic health records (Cohen & Mello, 2018). The aim of the policy change was to enhance the engagement of the patients in their care process by increasing access to health-related information.
The policy by the Trump’s administration had a number of impacts on system implementation. Firstly, it required the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to connect their beneficiaries with their claim-related data to increase their level of awareness. The policy also translated into the need for healthcare organizations to adopt systems that will enable patients to access their health information (Griffin & Chung, 2019). In addition, the systems were also supposed to enable patients to send their health information to where they liked without any restrictions from their healthcare providers and organizations.
The MyHealthEData policy has a number of effects on clinical care, patient-provider interactions and workflow. Firstly, the policy increases patient engagement in healthcare. The access of patients to their health-related data provides them the opportunity to participate in decision-making on issues affecting their health. The policy also enhances clinical care by having informed patient populations (Savino & Latifi, 2019). Informed patient population is likely to promote the desired lifestyle and behavioral changes to enhance health and wellbeing. The policy however has a negative effect on workflow since it predisposes patients’ data to loss of data integrity, due to access by unauthorized parties.
One of the organizational procedures that are in my place of healthcare organization to address the policy is providing patients access to their health information. The organization has also developed policies to guide the access and use of patient data by the healthcare providers (Tapscott, 2018). It has also adopted policies that strengthen the need for capacity development for staffs to ensure their competencies in the use of the new health information systems.
References
Cohen, I. G., & Mello, M. M. (2018). HIPAA and protecting health information in the 21st century. Jama, 320(3), 231–232. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.5630
Griffin, A. C., & Chung, A. E. (2019). Health Tracking and Information Sharing in the Patient-Centered Era: A Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) Study. AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2019, 1041.
Savino, J. A., & Latifi, R. (2019). Hospital and healthcare transformation over last few decades. In The Modern Hospital (pp. 23–29). Springer.
Tapscott, A. (2018). Value Based Healthcare: The Missing Formula for Quality Patient Care.
I agree that healthcare organizations make changes to workflow based on the cost to the company rather than the benefit to the employees and patients. The SDLC assessment proves that involving nurses in planning, analysis, and design, and implementing optimization systems is a valuable process (Wang et al., 2019, p. 419). Ignoring the role of nursing staff carries the risk of an unreasonable waste of available funds for the hospital. For example, at my facility upper management had remote telemetry upgraded in the EPIC system to include patients on a medical-surgical unit with no requirement for an registered nurse (RN) to be ACLS certified. They assigned one RN to the central room, in another location away from the unit to validate all the medical-surgical nurse telemetry strips. No floor nurse or champion was a part of the SDLC process before this was implemented. There have been two costly sentinel events; one medical-surgical nurse had a patient with telemetry orders after arriving from ER and never placed them on the monitor and notified the central monitor room nurse. The patient was found expired after being off telemetry with physician orders for 6 hours and a second nurse on a different patient never knew to contact the physician after 16 beats of V-tach. The patient coded and expired after going through consistent phase of tonic-clonic seizures. The central monitor registered nurse (CMRN) was only responsible for validating the telemetry strips and then management added the rapid response nurse (RRN) to the list preceding the sentinel events. When technology impacts nursing practice, and nurses do not understand the vision of the project, workflow issues will arise (McKay & Vanaskie, 2018). This situation is very unsafe and many medical-surgical nurse’s who take these assignments do not understand basic electrical rhythms and interventions for certain arrhythmias. Problems like this will continue to be a problem when a nurse’s voice is not a part of the SDLC process.