CCHIT will be sole health IT certifier, for now
By Mary Mosquera
Friday, August 14, 2009
The federal Health IT Policy Committee today endorsed recommendations that would leave the Certification Commission for Health IT in the short term as the sole organization authorized to certify health IT systems that qualified for funding under the economic stimulus plan. More certifying organizations would be added later.
Certification of electronic health record systems that met federal criteria for “meaningful use” of health IT could start as early as October, members of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health IT Policy Committee said at the August 14th meeting.
Under the plan, CCHIT would provide a preliminary stamp of approval that health IT systems were HHS-qualified or certified until a final meaningful use regulation is published at the end of the year, said Marc Probst, chief information office of Intermountain Healthcare and co-chairman of the Committee’s certification work group.
Preliminary certification is meant to give providers and vendors enough certainty to proceed with planning, designing and purchasing systems in 2010. The HHS certification-qualification would mean that a provider purchasing the systems would be eligible for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments under the stimulus law beginning in 2011.
Once meaningful use is finalized in December, national health IT coordinator Dr. David Blumenthal could determine how many additional certification groups could be set-up, Probst said. The national health IT coordinator’s office would create a process to select other groups with assistance from the National Institute for Standards and Technology.
Blumenthal was positive about the proposal. “I think the workgroup has given us a very thoughtful and workable solution,” he said. His office will review the transition plan.
In an Aug. 11 letter to the workgroup, CCHIT provided details tabout preliminary certification. Under the plan, CCHIT will certify some individual health IT components, such as electronic prescribing, for providers who do not have a comprehensive electronic health record system, it wrote. CCHIT would continue to certify comprehensive EHR systems as well.
A fair amount of meaningful use criteria is already part of existing certification requirements, Probst noted.
“We now have all the details to put this preliminary plan in place,” he told the Committee. It will be submitted (to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) so starting in October we can start doing testing for HHS certification or qualification,” Probst said.
Overall, certification should focus on meaningful use at a high level and leave the specifics to the healthcare provider, Probst said.
“We’re not trying to say how the systems will work,” he said. For example, the criteria require that providers’ systems be capable of alerts for drug-drug interaction but not how the software should work. “We need to move into second gear beyond harmonizing standards,” Probst said.
For electronic health record systems that were certified in 2008, vendors and providers would only have to update certification for criteria that is different with meaningful use, or gap criteria, such as a privacy review.
