Reference no: EM132859567

One of the most important modern healthcare information regulations of the current generation is the 1996 regulatory act called Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (Security, 2019). Over the years, many amendments were made to HIPAA, and in 2009 congress updated HIPAA with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) (Security, 2019). While HIPAA was intended for several beneficial purposes like making health insurance affordable and protecting patient data, loopholes in the act were being exploited by several parties and the electronic systems that were suggested to be incorporated into medical services were being ignored (Security, 2019). Thus, the HITECH act was proposed to pinch off the loopholes and to incentivize healthcare services to adopt the electronic health record (EHR) system.

Discussion 1: To understand why HIPAA and HITECH acts were developed in the first place, it is first important to acknowledge that the healthcare service industry has both economic and political dimensions. HITECH is a government incentive program encouraging physicians to implement electronic health records (Security, 2019). This industry-wide EHR adoption incentive program costs the congress billions of dollars every year. The act uses financial incentives to not just encourage physicians to adopt EHR, but to adopt EHR certified by the government (Security, 2019). While electronic records have been used since the 1960s (although only sparingly), the widespread use of computers in the 1990s tipped the government to consider implementing a widespread adoption of an EHR that could help in the recording and exchange of clinical information (Security, 2019). Even by the year 2009, only a few doctors had adopted the digital capabilities of the information age to record and share medical information, with most of them still holding on to the use of paper to record and share information (Security, 2019). Thus, one of the main reasons behind the enforcement of EHR was the many-fold increase in efficiency provided by EHR.