Course Project 5 Managing patient access has become both expensive and problematic. Discuss how a physician would manage the patient access to care, and contrast this with an HMO managing the...

Managing Patient Care 8
Running Head: MANAGING PATIENT ACCESS TO MEDICAL CARE
Contrast between Physician and HMOs in Managing Patient Access to Medical Care
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Contrast between Physician and HMOs in Managing Patient Access to Medical Care
In order to provide quality health care that meets the demands of patients, health care facilities need to be financially viable, and cost effective. The healthcare patient access also termed as the admission/ registration system, is important in organizing information so as to prevent confusion and ove
urden the healthcare facilities. As such, most hospitals have a patient access department which is responsible for the development and management of strategies to assist in patient flow. The management of patient flow determines the scheduling of other activities in the healthcare institutions (Wolper, 2004). The responsibilities of the patient access department have evolved and encompass scheduling, reviewing refe
als, verify requests and legibility of payment, and obtaining authorizations (Merisalo, 2009). The management of patient flow also reduces the resources required in the provision of patient care (Hall, 2006). There is a great contrast on how physicians manage access to care for patients, and how Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs).
There have been several legislations and amendments with regards to patient access management. The main legislation regarding patient access management is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has responsibility of providing federal protection with regards to access to patient information, as it provides patients with rights to privacy with their medical information. It provides rules and regulations for health care administration to guarantee confidentiality, and integrity, particularly with electronic medical records (U.S Department of Health, n.d; Ross & Lin, 2002). However, there have been amendments to this legislation, especially with the federal register rule (Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information in 2002 or the Privacy Rule), which proposes that patients can access their laboratory information directly from the laboratory without the intervention of health care administrators. This rule accords individual with the right to access, obtain, and analyze protected medical information. The federal register rule also amends the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment of 1988 which dealt with the issue release of laboratory test result to authorized health care personnel (Federal Register, 2011). The recent legislation on managing patient access is the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009, which altered how healthcare facilities deal with patients’ right to access,...