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Recommended: The importance of electronic health records

Primary care in the United States has been in a state of neglect or of being underfunded for a long time. This dysfunctional state has been allowed to occur despite evidence, which shows the importance of primary care in creating healthy outcomes and controlling costs. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) tries to address some of these issues by:
• Innovations in the delivery of healthcare
• Investments in the primary care workforce
• Improving patient health care experiences and outcomes
The United States has been slow in addressing the need for an effective primary care health care system either due to special interest groups or the lack of political will to take on this challenge. In January 2000, an article in JAMA, (The Journal of the American Medical Association) tiled “Is US Health really the Best in the World?” noted that there were 40 million people with no healthcare insurance in the United States. Moreover, some health care consumers were under the belief that better health outcomes were the result of expensive care and treatment (Starfield). The article also notes that 20% to 30% of patients receive contraindicated care and that an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 patients die each year because of medical errors (Starfield).
Constrained care is defined as “care that should not have been delivered was delivered” (Schuster, McGlynn and Brook). One of the ways to reduce the instances of constrained care is the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR). The ACA promotes the use of EHR’s in order to facilitate the submission and payment of Medicare and Medicaid bills. However, the use of EHR systems also provides caregivers with broad picture of a patient’s healthcare history. Moreover, EHRs are intended to be transportable to oth...

... middle of paper ...

... demand for primary care physicians to grow by about 14% outpacing the projected supply of primary care physicians, resulting in a projected shortage of 20,400 physicians in 2014.

Works Cited

Schuster, Mark A, Elizabeth A McGlynn and Robert H Brook. "How Good Is the Quality of Health Care in the United States?" Nov 2005. US National Library of Medicine. The Milbank Quarterly. Web. April 2014. .
Starfield, B. "Is US Health Really the Best in the World?" JAMA doi:10.1001/jama.284.4.483 (2000): 483-485. Web.
US Department of Health and Human Services. "Projecting the Supply and Demand for Primary Care Practitioners through 2020." 2013. HRSA Health Professions. Health Resources and Services Administration. Web. 2014. .

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