Professional Standards in the U.S. Healthcare System (Essay Sample)

Professional Standards in the U.S. Healthcare System Author’s Name Department, Institutional Affiliation Course Number: Course Title Instructor’s Name Due Date Professional Standards in the U.S. Healthcare System Why Standards Are Vital Professional standards are the epitome of competence at various levels of care and in each phase of the nursing process. First, standards define a desirable clinical performance against which outcomes in nursing practice must be compared (Davis, 2014). They are an important tool in the nursing profession because they serve as an accurate guide for clinical practice. Second, a standard serves both as an evaluation instrument to ensure nursing proficiency, and a framework for guiding the development of clinical competency skills in a facility. Third, professional standards assist a healthcare organization in developing safe nursing practices, delegating tasks to (un-)licensed personnel, ensuring documentation accuracy, and creating new policies (Davis, 2014). The overall purpose of standards in health care, therefore, is to instruct and maintain safe, effective, and professionally competent practices for effective patient care. In addition to promoting competency, professional standards also guarantee that nurses and clinicians will be accountable during clinical decision-making and in career development. Standards are essentially patient-centered and are designed to promote the best possible healthcare outcomes and reduce exposure to risk (Davis, 2014). Standards therefore push clinicians to consistently broaden their knowledge base experientially, through continuing education, and by familiarizing with the latest guidelines. Finally, standards help identify areas of improvement in clinical practice while also providing an opportunity for improved patient care and workplace safety. A Most Vital HIT Standard Health care in the U.S. has evolved into what the Academy of Medicine calls a learning healthcare system. This new framework focuses on delivering quality patient care at all times in acknowledgement of the emergence of precision health care and increasingly complex decision making for both patients and clinicians. Therefore, the learning healthcare system is a sustainable tool that captures results and uses them to inform further improvement and for future reference. My current organization has achieved the learning healthcare system by implementing three key informatics solutions: adopting digital records, system interoperability, and timely data aggregation, analysis, and presentation. My organization implemented the FHIR standard to achieve these solutions—this option was inspired by the ability of FHIR to address the interoperability challenge. FHIR applications prove useful in data presentation especially regarding new knowledge acquired from past care. FHIR allows busy clinicians to adapt well to the demanding workplace environment and to achieve effective clinical workflow. The FHIR standard has been evolving at a fast rate. Fundamentally, FHIR consists of several resources designed to meet specific clinical demands. Therefore, the set of resources available at a facility and the nature of each resource is dependent on the FHIR version used. The FHIR standard allows a facility to implement extensions and also allow for storage of additional information that may not be defined by this standard. The FHIR standard at my current facility espouses nine modules. The Foundation is the base infrastructure upon which all system specifications rest. Security and Privacy offers documented information and services designed to create and maintain patient data security and privacy. Conformance allows the facility to test the extent of adherence to clinical specifications and guidelines. Linked Data defines how clinicians can use the Resource Description Framework to define FHIR content and how to use ontologies in health care. Administration offers resources for tracking patients, clinicians, departments, devices, and prescriptions. The Clinical module facilitates the categorization of core clinical information, including health conditions, allergies, care plans, and referrals. Medications and Diagnostics resources allow for management of medication, patient observations, and diagnostic requests and reports. The Financial module facilitates billing and claims reporting, while the Clinical Reasoning module offers guidelines for decision support and quality assurance. HIT Standard Improvement OAuth 2.0 has been a major breakthrough in identity and access delegation due to its highly extensible authorization capabilities. At present, OAuth 2.0 is the de facto standard for ensuring Application Programming Interface (API) security and has been used widely on platforms such as Facebook and PayPal (Siriwardena, 2019). However, OAuth 2.0 needs significant improvement considering its vulnerability to a variety of attacks which leave a patient’s personal information dangerously exposed. A cross site request forgery (CSRF) attack intercepts an ongoing interaction between a...