MHA Information Technology 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which federal program incentivized hospitals to adopt certified EHR technology by offering Medicare and Medicaid bonus payments?
- MACRA Quality Payment Program
- Meaningful Use / Promoting Interoperability Program (Correct answer)
- Value-Based Purchasing Program
- Stark Law Safe Harbor Program
Correct answer: Meaningful Use / Promoting Interoperability Program
The Meaningful Use program (later renamed Promoting Interoperability) under the HITECH Act provided financial incentives for adopting and demonstrating meaningful use of certified EHR technology.
Question 2: What is the MAIN benefit of using a clinical data warehouse compared to a live EHR database for population health analytics?
- It provides real-time data for point-of-care decisions
- It avoids performance impact on production systems and enables complex historical queries (Correct answer)
- It eliminates the need for data governance policies
- It automatically de-identifies all patient data
Correct answer: It avoids performance impact on production systems and enables complex historical queries
A clinical data warehouse stores historical data in an optimized read structure, allowing complex analytics without slowing down the operational EHR.
Question 3: Under the ONC's Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), what role does a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) play?
- It certifies EHR products for Meaningful Use
- It serves as a network-level intermediary enabling nationwide health information exchange (Correct answer)
- It enforces HIPAA penalties on covered entities
- It manages Medicare claims processing
Correct answer: It serves as a network-level intermediary enabling nationwide health information exchange
QHINs are designated networks that connect to each other and to participants under TEFCA, enabling nationwide interoperability through a common set of rules.
Question 4: Which security concept ensures that users can only access the minimum information necessary to perform their job functions?
- Defense in depth
- Principle of least privilege (Correct answer)
- Zero-trust architecture
- Role-based encryption
Correct answer: Principle of least privilege
The principle of least privilege limits user access rights to only what is strictly required for their role, reducing the attack surface.
Question 5: A hospital is implementing predictive analytics to identify patients at risk for sepsis. Which type of clinical decision support is being deployed?
- Passive reference information
- Proactive alerting with predictive model output (Correct answer)
- Order set recommendations
- Dose range checking
Correct answer: Proactive alerting with predictive model output
Sepsis prediction tools use machine learning models to proactively alert clinicians when a patient's data patterns indicate elevated sepsis risk.
Question 6: What does a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) define in a healthcare IT disaster recovery plan?
- The maximum amount of data that can be lost after an outage
- The maximum acceptable time to restore a system to operational status after a failure (Correct answer)
- The frequency of data backup snapshots
- The cost limit for disaster recovery operations
Correct answer: The maximum acceptable time to restore a system to operational status after a failure
RTO defines how quickly a system must be restored after a disaster, while RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines how much data loss is acceptable.
Question 7: Which imaging data standard governs the format, storage, and transmission of medical images such as CT scans and MRIs?
- HL7 v2
- DICOM (Correct answer)
- FHIR
- NCPDP SCRIPT
Correct answer: DICOM
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the universal standard for medical imaging data format, storage, and network transmission.
MHA Information Technology 4
Which federal program incentivized hospitals to adopt certified EHR technology by offering Medicare and Medicaid bonus payments?