Information technologies are now used in many industries, and such an important area of human life as healthcare is also involved in this process. The latest digital developments have a positive effect on the development of the most promising methods of organizing the provision of medical care to the population around the world. At the same time, the effective construction of information technology infrastructure is gaining more and more importance.
Technologies for Health Information Management
Many countries have been actively adapting innovations in the medical field for a long time. Among them are remote consultations of patients and staff, remote fixation of physiological parameters, automated data analysis, exchange of patient data between different institutions, and much more. There are many software tools available for networking, communication, recording, storing and organizing data. Additionally, there are online services to support the collection of information and research (Liang et al., 2019). Therefore, there are different approaches and technologies for working with information in a modern health care system, including electronic and automated, and manual and physical.
The introduction of IT in medicine made it possible to bring its advancement to a new level and had a beneficial effect on improving the provision of medical care to the population. The new systems are more secure and adapted for the safe storage of patient data (Chen et al., 2019). New software products are actively being developed, making a significant contribution to the development of advanced technologies in medicine.
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act Effects
The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) highlights the need to use a pay-for-value system. This means that the employee in the health care system does not receive his or her pay correlated with working hours or volume of work, but rather directly reflecting the performance (Sadowsky et al., 2019). In this case, the best employees will receive more for their work than the average, and the worst, on the contrary, will receive less, and they will have an incentive to move to another job or start working on improving their own qualifications, skills, and knowledge. A positive selection will take place, which is beneficial for the employer and the organization as a whole. Therefore, the use of MACRA should have a positive effect on the quality of service for patients, as the employees will be motivated to work better and improve their skills.
Promoting Interoperability Initiative
Interoperability means the synthesis of service and electronic data to provide the most efficient patient care in terms of quality and time. Criteria such as quality, cost, promoting interoperability, and improvement activities for assessing the size of doctors’ work are included (Sadowsky et al., 2019). This is why interoperability is closely tied to MACRA as a criterion for evaluation. This criterion gives medical personnel an incentive to apply modern and optimized technologies to improve service.
In conclusion, medicine in the modern world is going through many structural changes. New technologies are emerging to empower the health sector. At the same time, the human factor is important, since people still work in this sector and the quality of service depends on their motivation. In this regard, correct approaches to staff motivation are important, and one of these is MACRA, which offers merit-based and alternative payment methods that allow organizations to pay only for a high-quality result. The introduction of MACRA allows organizations to lower costs while improving quality.
References
Chen, Y., Ding, S., Xu, Z., Zheng, H., & Yang, S. (2019). Blockchain-based medical records secure storage and medical service framework. Journal of Medical Systems, 43(1), 1-9. Web.
Sadowsky, D., Li, T., Hasan, U., Harnain, C., Gilet, A., & Gerard, P. (2019). Making sense of MACRA: A guide for diagnostic radiologists. Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology, 48(1), 1-3. Web.
Liang, J., Zheng, X., Chen, Z., Dai, S., Xu, J., Ye, H., Zhang, Z., Ge, F. & Lei, J. (2019). The experience and challenges of healthcare-reform-driven medical consortia and regional health information technologies in China: A longitudinal study. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 131, 103954. Web.