Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Essay
Develop a 3- to 4-page paper, written to your organization’s leadership team, addressing the 21st Century Cures Act and how it is impacting your work setting. Be sure to address the following: Describe the Cures Act and its impact on your organization. Use organizational data to quantify the impact (if necessary, seek assistance from leadership or appropriate stakeholders in your organization). Provide a brief summary of the two articles you reviewed from outside resources on the national healthcare issue/stressor. Explain how the healthcare issue/stressor is being addressed in other organizations. Summarize the strategies used to address the organizational impact of the 21st Century Cures Act presented in the scholarly resources you selected. Explain how they may impact your organization both positively and negatively. Be specific and provide examples. Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Essay
Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue
Introduction
Several national healthcare issues impact the healthcare system and healthcare organizations in the US. These issues should be addressed to improve the standards of healthcare; however, some issues are more urgent than others. Healthcare leaders should stay abreast with the ever-evolving healthcare system in order to address emerging healthcare issues. The selected healthcare issue is the Cures Act, also known as the 21st Century Act. Cures Act is a regulation that aims to accelerate the access of medication and medical devices and ensure patients have complete transparency and information regarding their healthcare costs and their healthcare outcomes (Martin, 2020).Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Essay
National Healthcare Issue
The 21st Century Cures Act was ratified in December 2016, and it is a regulation that aims to accelerate the time taken to get pharmaceutical medications and medical devices into the market, addressing mental health and funds allocation to fight the opioid epidemic (addressing price transparency) (Martin, 2020). The Cures Act also addresses the complex area of health information technology, especially electronic health records (EHRs), as well as the critical issue of interoperability. The Act also prohibits information-blocking practices and thus increases information transparency for patients. Through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the health information is made more computable and this gives patients more control of their health records, and thus increases patient engagement in their care. The Cures Act ensures improved interoperability of the EHRs. Basically, the regulation consists of three elements price transparency, information blocking, transfer (ADT) sharing, and admission, discharge (DesRoches et al., 2020).
The Impact of the Cures Act on the Healthcare Organization
My organization has been making changes to comply with the Cures Act and hence as a healthcare practitioner and nurse informaticist, I have been proactive in supporting and implementing changes to adhere to the regulation. The organization is required to ensure the immediate release of patients’ results and ensure that notes from healthcare providers are shared with patients as per the Massachusetts State Law.Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Essay
In order to eliminate information blocking, interprofessional members from the information technology department, legal, compliance, and clinical informatics worked together to ensure that the patient information is documented in the patient portal, where patients can easily access the information. Therefore, the Cures Act has improved access to patient information and eliminated information blocking in my organization.
Moreover, to adhere to the price transparency as per the Act, a payment estimator application was added to the organizational electronic system. The estimator includes procedural costs and the charges of various medications and medical supplies. Adhering with price transparency aims to reduce healthcare costs and allows patients to seek out health care of the best value. Moreover, the Cures Act also addresses admission, discharge, and information transfer. As a result, healthcare organizations are required to notify post-acute care services providers or pre-identified primary care providers or group after a patient registers in the emergency department, admitted, discharged, or transferred from the hospital (Barlas, 2018). My organization has adopted an interprofessional team approach to leverage the electronic health record system to create notifications to the appropriate professionals and facilitate information sharing (ADT). Analysis of a Pertinent Healthcare Issue Essay
Summary of the Articles
According to Humphries et al (2018), the 21st Century Cures Act requires the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to be amended to ensure a more efficient process for updating susceptibility test interpretive measures to acknowledge antimicrobial resistance. This is to ensure information transparency and accelerate the access to drugs’ information by the consumers. This article supports the importance of updating accurate information about medications, and in this case antibiotics, including antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, with such information, both the clinicians and the patients can access information about the susceptibility to microorganisms against antimicrobials and hence know the probability of efficacy of antimicrobial treatment, based on the most and best available current information about pharmacodynamic/pharmacokinetic, resistance, and clinical outcome of various medications (Humphries et al., 2018).
