HITECH Act: Electronic Health Records and Patient Information

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was enacted in 2009 to promote the adoption and use of information technology in healthcare, with the aim of providing incentives to facilitate the creation of a better healthcare infrastructure. The act also widened the scope of privacy and security measures, imposing mandatory penalties for willful neglect and notification requirements for data breaches. Despite some initial challenges, the act has been fully implemented, leading to an increase in EHR adoption by physicians, innovation in the healthcare sector, and improved population health.

Name of student:
Registration number:
Subject code:
Name of supervisor:
Date due:

Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act
The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act
was enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The act
was signed into law in February the year 2009. The aim of this Act was to promote
adoption and use of information technology in a useful manner (Kevin & Michael,
2011). This Act was meant to help provide incentives related to health care
information technology so as to facilitate creation of a better health care infrastructure
(Act, 2010). The incentives also are aimed at accelerating the rate of adoption of
Electronic Health records (EHR) with this Act, there was to be a massive exchange of
patient information, and therefore it necessitated the need for laws to govern the
sharing patient information. The HITECH also widens the scope of privacy and
security measures. This Act also increases liability for those who fail to comply.
HITECH imposed mandatory penalties for willful neglect with the penalties
determined on a case by case basis. The penalties were set at a minimum of$250,000.
This was mean to enhance the enforcement of the ACT and to help protect the privacy
of citizens. The Act imposed notification requirement for data breaches for people
who are not authorized. In case of any unsecured breach of a patients` information,
the act requires that patients need to be notified promptly.
After the enactment and implementation of HITECH Act, there were many events that
were not expected that occurred. Some of the policies were too strict and this
discouraged innovation. An example is the Clean Air and Clean water act under
HITECH which helped to contribute to cleaner market but also crippled innovation.
The market forces should be allowed to dictate restrictions. The use of value based

reimbursement has led to many organizations offering health care to adopt systems for
population health management (Ramirez, Lee, & Hixon, 2011).
The HITECH Act has been implemented fully at this point with most of the health
providers having complied with all the regulations. Studies have established that the
adoption of EHR systems by physicians has exceeded what was predicted by 7%. The
Act has also helped greatly in encouraging innovations in the health care sector over
the years since the health care providers are provided with incentives to innovate.
More than 700 new innovations have been recorded since the enactment of the Act.
This has helped greatly in achieving the objective of the act. The Act has helped in
population health improvement with Medicaid program being an important partner
(Sittig, & Singh, 2010). This is because public health facilities and agencies are not
the only custodian of data on population health. The Act has resulted to more
emphasis on privacy and security for client information. The serious penalties
imposed by the Act have driven many health care providers to design information
system that are of higher standards and to upgrade their server’s security. In addition
to this, the clean air and water act has contributed to improved environmental
conditions by most providers of health services and hence impacting positively on the
health sector.

References
Act, H. I. T. E. C. H. (2010). Health Information Technology for Economic and
Clinical Health.
Kevin, F., & Michael, B. (2011). Clinician adoption of technology. Physician
executive, 37(4), 82.
Ramirez, R., Lee, C., & Hixon, J. (2011). Health Information Technology for
Economic and Clinical Health.
Sittig, D. F., & Singh, H. (2010). A new sociotechnical model for studying health
information technology in complex adaptive healthcare systems. Quality and
Safety in Health Care, 19(Suppl 3), i68-i74.
.