The meaningful use initiative was put in place so as to promote the use of the electronic health records. As a way of promoting the use of the EHR in the healthcare systems, the federal government committed more than 30 billion dollars as incentives for the organizations that were adopting the use of the EHR. The meaningful use initiative has gained popularity because it is one of the significant public investments in the healthcare sector in the last 30 years. As a way of promoting the use of the EHR, the eligible professionals receive payments through the Medicaid EHR Incentive and the Medicare EHR incentive (Jung, Unruh, Kaushal, & Vest, June). For anyone to qualify for the EHR initiatives, an organization had to demonstrate that …show more content…
Adopting the use of the EHR is very easy, but the continued use of the systems has presented a significant challenge to the physicians. Although the number of participants increased significantly in 2012, it is notable that the largest number of physicians who had participated in 2011 did not take part in 2012 (Watcher, 2014). There are penalties that reduce reimbursements especially among the nonparticipants. However, it is noted that these penalties are not effective in promoting adoption (Modern Medicine Network, 2013). The number of participants who are not taking part is so large. For those who are using the EHR, they are known to be members of a large institution. In this case, the organization has a lot of financial resources and thus it is easy to adopt the use of the EHR without significant challenges. It has been observed that the physicians who are adopting the EHR have some characteristics. Some of the key aspects are that the physicians, who have fully adopted the use of the EHR, are participants who have had an experience working with the EHR (Jung, Unruh, Kaushal, & Vest, June). The key strengths of the study are that the researcher was able to achieve the key objective of the study. However, the main weakness of the study is that it only focused on New York, and thus, it may be hard to scale up the results (Modern Medicine Network, 2013). On the other hand, the study was carried out for two years and this could not have been enough for such a study. Opportunities for the researcher are that they can use the same results to study the effectiveness of the program in other areas (Basch & Kuhn, 2016). The principal threat is that the results of the study have limitations and there may be other underlying issues that have not been covered for example, the