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The Globalization Of The Healthcare Industry

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The past decade has been a unique one for the healthcare industry in the United States, defined by new legislation, political strife, and revolutionary ideas in practice and payment. An aging population, coupled with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which created an uptick in the number of citizens covered, gave birth to a new problem for hospitals and insurers alike – rising costs of healthcare delivery with declining revenues. With the shifting payor mix leaning more and more towards government sponsored business, healthcare providers were faced with lower payments than the private insurance rates for higher risk patients with more complicated needs, creating a higher cost for the services for lower paying coverage. The …show more content…

These four measures that define meaningful use laid out the framework for healthcare reform, emphasizing the importance of the EHR in healthcare delivery through financial incentives, while giving significant weight to the security of the protected health information of the individual patient. Through Medicare and Medicaid incentives, a healthcare provider could receive over $100,000 for complying with the rules of HITECH, but non-compliant providers would receive a 1% decrease in funding, with that percentage increasing each subsequent year (Hudock & Wagner, 2009). Not only are the bonus incentives granted, but the government would also reimburse the provider for implementing the EHR, recouping nearly the entire amount that they paid to enforce the system. Failure to do so would result in a cut in funding, and penalties for non-compliance to the standards would result in financial sanctions of up to $1.5 million per calendar year (Ouellette, 2015). With the number of Medicare eligible patients steadily increasing every year, it became essential to become compliant with the standards outlined in the HITECH Act, and the implementation of an EHR became a priority issue to be carried out in an immediate fashion. Any time a process change is

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