The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 includes a section called
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH)
that is slated to provide $19 billion for health information technology—specifically
providing funding to those healthcare organizations that can demonstrate their use of
an electronic health record (EHR) in a meaningful way by 2014. The recent discussions
around the HITECH Act has led to concerns and confusion, not only about what will
guarantee an acceptable EHR solution, but also about the very definition of what an
EHR is and how it differs from the business, or legal, health record (LHR). While EHRs
do hold great value in the clinical world, they require significant human oversight in the
LHR and release-of-information (ROI) world.
This white paper defines the differences between the clinical EHR and the LHR,
explains where the clinical record hits many walls, or roadblocks, once it enters the ROI
world in the form of an LHR, and why it is imperative that every healthcare
organization has human intervention in the health information management (HIM)
environment. Finally, it will also explain the extreme complexity of the actual ROI
process, further justifying the need for human oversight.
To read the full whitepaper, click here.
