HITECH Meaningful Use – The Past is not Behind Us

Many healthcare providers have said goodbye to HITECH’s meaningful use stage 1 to pursue the stage 2 requirements. However, the future is not a stranger to its predecessor, requiring a better realization of concepts and metrics of many standards in stage 1.

Stage 1 was the beginning of HITECH’s transformative approach to health care, requiring movement to electronic health records (EHRs) and more efficient transmission and use of the EHRs, which is proving to be beneficial to patients and their care as evidenced by the ease of e-prescribing. To ensure continuous progress of realizing the vision of greater health information effectiveness, care providers must continue to raise the bar and push for increasing processes such as e-prescribing and introducing processes that share care information with other relative providers while still maintaining the privacy and security standards for patient information.

This stage also solidifies new requirements such as bringing patient health records to the world of internet accessibility and giving the patients greater insight into their own health information. This increases the potential risks for the providers despite the convenience and usefulness of the program as a whole. Incurring this additional risk will require organizations to perform additional risk analysis to stay in front of the threats and ensure that best practices are followed while encrypting information in storage and transit as well as working with clients to raise awareness of information security.

Stage 2 will bring a new planning phase, but also a new cycle in the life of what should be a living process. If you are struggling to optimize your process, let RISC Management help you maximize the potential of meaningful use stage 1 while developing a secure plan and foundation for the new requirements in stage 2.