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  The Health Record Review
by Patty Enrado


How many organizations does it take to certify EHRs?

Posted on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 - 03:23 am

No, that question is not a joke in the vein of "How many fill-in-the-blanks-here does it take to change a light bulb." The answer, which will evolve in the next several months, will determine if the certification process' trustworthiness is worth the increased complexity with the addition of more bodies.

On Friday, the Health Information Technology Policy Committee recommended to the Dept. of Health and Human Services that electronic health record products should be certified by multiple organizations. The recommendation essentially validates criticism of conflict of interest by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), currently the only body that certifies such products, because healthcare IT vendors helped form the group back in 2004 and have influenced their decisions and direction.

 

The recommendation is critical because under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act providers who adopt health IT can apply for federal stimulus funds from a total pot of $17 billion, so long as they meet "meaningful use" criteria. CCHIT announced that it would launch a certification program that will include criteria for providers to achieve meaningful use out of their EHR systems.

 

The Meaningful Use workgroup recommended to the federal advisory panel that some 10 to 12 organizations handle the certification process. The Certification and Adoption workgroup suggested opening up the process to open source and systems, which would level the playing field and loosen the hold that traditional health IT vendors have enjoyed.

 

Those in the industry who felt CCHIT wielded too much power in EHR certification cheered Friday’s recommendations. But while the federal government will have to approve of the organizations, it will also have to ensure that the certification process is uniform to CCHIT. The recommendations have laid out the road map. Now comes the hard work: How will those organizations be formed or chosen? How easy will it be to ensure uniformity of the certification procedures? That’s the next battle.


Comments

Posted by Basha besh on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 - 11:55 am.

I think it takes more than 5 organizations to certify EHR.
Many have been working on this for years, I wish them all the best of luck.
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Posted by Norman on Fri, Aug 21, 2009 - 03:40 pm.

This comment is directed at Ms. Enrado, author of the article.. Ms. Enrado i invite you to explore the use of a portable US EMR, one which will stand toe to toe with all the other players and come out heads and shoulders above them all. Why is everyone married to the mob errr web? It seems that they must love to have their data hacked (what was yesterday's cute discovery about an on line site)and sold to insurance companies, drug companies or just plain used for medical fraud.
I have designed my USB EMR to be 110% full featured down to E-Prescriptions, ICD 9/10 /SNOMED codes (which no one understands yet), even has an EMT Incident report form, so that when the pt. is brought into the ER, they tech can print out a sheet with everything they did to the pt, so the ER Doc can just scan it to see what was done. or if he has the time he can insert the pt's EMR into their computer and read the results on the form.
He can likewise fill in everything he does and orders for the pt. right then an there and when the patient either goes home or gets admitted, every single thing done to and for his was entered and is part of the permanent record on his medi-chip and part of the hospitals computer system too. Nothing on line, nothing that can get hacked unless the hospitals computer is open to hackers.
His chip is his personal one, that he wears on his wrist or around his neck, or attached to his key ring or carried in his walled like his credit card..It is password protected and he can block and encrypt anything that he doesn't want seen, his doctor can use the built in CMS 1500 form and email it to us for processing (we have a 95% first pass approval rate and 98.5% second pass rate). We even provide a special cardiac program, diabetic wound care program and a pain and Opiod program plus so much more that to list them here would take a long time.
And yet we only charge $39.95 and provide the entire program free of charge to any physician that agrees to either sell or give our chips to his patients (heck he makes it back the firs time he uses it to down load the patients data).
Now for the last interesting point and question. Everyone is worried about Socialized Medicine, but nothing is being said about reimbursement for physicians that use the EMS Portable or not. Every time they have to copy over their patients charts from paper to digital format they under go a laborious task, and if you look there are codes (CD 9 and CPT) that today pay a physician for coping to digital format, providing telephonic transference of digital data to a patient or shall i go on. Give the doctor some coin for transferring their paper to digital and I guarantee you they stop bitching about all this garbage.. give them the teaspoon of sugar to make the medicine go down and you will get 100% more cooperation. don't you think so?

Posted by Norman on Fri, Aug 21, 2009 - 03:21 pm.

Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), currently the only body that certifies such products, because healthcare IT vendors helped form the group back in 2004 and have influenced their decisions and direction.
IF this is true (the above) then I think the CCHIT should be disbanded because is smells of "the Good Old Boy Network" and if certain groups and vendors helped the CCHIT they most surely will be getting some of the spoils.
I bitched and moaned about the $25,000 price tag on certification w/ CCHIT so they lowered it to $10,000.. hmmmm wonder how many "vendors" are sharing in that pie? If I offend anyone by that remark then i would think that those offended were THOSE vendors and should recluse themselves from any further dealings with the CCHIT or certification process and be barred from entering into the EMR arena.. Too bad, you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar one time too many.
That's my opinion and you are welcome to it..