Contemporary Nursing, Essay Example

How will the meaningful use of EHR and the data it produceshelp to reduce health care costs?

Meaningful use encompasses a series of strategies, which focus on reducing health care costs. For example, in improving care coordination, inevitable cost is reduced. With haphazard services more resources are required. On many occasions duplication of tasks occur, which increases health cost. When health care disparities are minimized it provides more access to care. This feature may not directly impact cost reduction, but ultimately, there will be less conditions to treat now that disparities are closed (Cherry & Jacob, 2014).

Also when patients and their families are involved in their care it takes less time to resolve a health issue. Time is money and inevitable health care costs are lessened. In the same way when health promotion ventures are undertaken by public health authorities, it reduces the incidence of disease. This does eliminate unnecessary costs of treating preventable conditions. Privacy and security has always been sensitive issues in health care record keeping and execution of services. Breaches occur in liability resulting law suits whereby institutions have to pay violation claims ( Bewley, Perry,  Fawdry & Cumming, 2011).

How has it already helped nursing practice byproviding data on quality indicators?

Meaningful use has already provided numerous protections in patient care delivery across healthcare institutions in America. For example, the information technology aspect has designed a computerized medication order entry system, which is expected to minimize medication errors. This is poses serious patient safety issues. Other associating improvement it has offered relates toimplementing drug-drug, drug-allergy evaluations as well as maintaining a  current problem list of active patient diagnoses (Bewley et.al, 2011)

References

Bewley, S. Perry, H. Fawdry, R., & Cumming, G. (2011). NHS IT requires the wisdom of the crowd not the marketplace.BMJ 343: d6484

Cherry, B. & Jacob, S. (2014). Contemporary nursing: Issues, trends & management (6th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Mosby.