HIT Medicare and Medicaid Incentive Programs – Encouraging the Switch
There are millions of people in America that have no idea how they would pay for doctor bills, hospital bills or medication if they were to suddenly get injured or seriously ill. This is just one symptom of a broken health care system in this country that has been begging for legitimate reform for many years now. Politicians are just now becoming willing to admit that the way that health insurance companies operate should not be a reason for people to go bankrupt. HIT Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs are just one way that the government is trying to address this problem.
In case you’ve never really heard of HIT Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs before, you should know that they are part of the way that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 hoped to encourage greater efficiency and accuracy in the health care industry. If you’ve been to the doctor recently, you know that there are always some preliminary questions that you have to answer to give the doctor some perspective on your current condition. The answers that you provide help to form a medical history that will stay with you throughout your entire life.
One of the problems with the current health care system is that these records are kept on paper, and many patients have trouble remembering the medications or treatments that they have received unless they bring a copy of these records with them when they visit a new doctor. The HIT Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs are designed to encourage hospitals and doctors that regularly see patients enrolled in these government programs to switch to electronic record keeping systems instead. The eventual vision is that there will be national database systems that will allow doctors all over the country to instantly access a complete record for each patient.
If you’re thinking that HIT Medicare and Medicaid incentive programs sound like a great idea but are likely to take many years to be implemented in your area, you should know that the government has taken specific steps to make sure that hospitals and doctors make these changes quickly. One such provision is the fact that failure to install systems that make a meaningful use of electronic health records could see a declining Medicare reimbursement rate. If hospitals want to continue receiving full reimbursement for these patients, they will have to find a way to implement more efficient systems right away.
