The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) approved final criteria today for certifying inpatient and emergency department electronic health records.
It also published standards for a new category of certification — enterprise EHRs — to cover vendors that provide interoperable outpatient, inpatient and emergency room records.
Dr. Mark Leavitt, CCHIT chairman, said the approvals mean outpatient and inpatient EHRs must now be able to exchange clinical in the Continuity of Care Document format, “making basic elements of health records, such as medications and allergies, interoperable and portable for the first time.”
The first applications for products to be certified against the new criteria will be accepted Aug. 1-14.
This concludes CCHIT’s work on its 2008 agenda for establishing health IT certification criteria. It published final outpatient, child health and cardiovascular medicine criteria May 20 and will take certification applications for those products July 1 - 14.
CCHIT said it would set up a July 10 teleconference for vendors interested in the new certifications.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
