The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a part of the national strategy for quality improvement in healthcare. ACA was implemented in 2009 to address the unprecedentedly escalating prices of healthcare (McBride & Tietze, 2018). The main idea is to control the cost to a possible extent while improving the care services. ACA is in a direct relationship with nursing informatics since it establishes the framework for qualitative performance evaluation – the requirement of sufficient technology implementation stands among the crucial ones.
Through the ACA, healthcare organizations aim to transform the healthcare system to contain or stabilize healthcare costs. Information technology such as Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems provides the utility of storing a significant amount of patient data in digital space, which increases its accessibility within and outside of healthcare organizations (Casas, 2021). This way, healthcare organizations are able to drastically reduce the costs of patient data maintenance. Therefore, EHR implementation falls under the ACA’s responsibility.
In terms of clinical care, ACA has significantly increased the accessibility of health services to the population. In particular, it regulated the costs of health insurance, which led to a drop from 18% to almost 13% of the uninsured population in the U.S. (Casas, 2021). Apart from that, it increased the emphasis on the role of individual practitioners in healthcare management, increasing the level of interaction between the patients and providers. As a result, their workflow had to change as well to be able to incorporate technological and interactive modifications.
The medical personnel of the Metropolitan Hospital of Miami voiced various opinions on the adoption of EHRs aimed to adhere to ACA qualitative requirements. On the one hand, they supported the implementation of EHRs due to their positive effect on clinical decision support and the reduction of medical errors (Casas, 2021). On the other hand, medical staff complained about the changes to workflow and work disruption caused by hardware implementation (Casas, 2021). However, the complaints can be considered temporary since post-EHR-adoption practice does not anticipate drastic changes of such a scale.
References
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2018). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse: Patient safety, quality, outcomes, and interprofessionalism (2nd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.
Casas, P. A. (2021). Qualitative comparative case study exploring the interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts experienced by nurses while utilizing EHR-Electronic Health Record technology. Nova Southeastern University.