The American Hospital Association's recently released advocacy agenda for 2014 focuses on the growing importance of health IT to hospitals and health systems, as well as the demands of health IT implementation.
In the agenda, the AHA reiterated its stance that while the organization agrees with the overall objectives of the meaningful use and other electronic health record incentive programs, the timeline should be more flexible to ensure all hospitals, including smaller and critical access organizations, have the time to properly implement and optimize an EHR system.
The AHA also reaffirmed its call for a national patient identifier system to facilitate the exchange of patient health information on a larger scale.
In addition, the AHA said it will continue to urge health IT vendors to remove clauses from their contracts that either limits a customer's ability to raise a safety concern or indemnifies the vendor in the event of a patient safety incident.
More Articles on the AHA:
25 Recipients of Becker's Healthcare 2014 Leadership Awards
AHA: Changes Need to Be Made to Medicare ACO Programs
AHA Exclusively Endorses MEDHOST's Patient Flow Management Solution