Certification Commission Announces Newly Certified EHR Products for Hospitals

Opens public comment on latest draft of criteria and test scripts for 2008

CHICAGO – January 22, 2008 – The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology announced today that three additional electronic health record (EHR) products designed for use in acute care hospitals have received CCHIT Inpatient EHR 2007 certification status, bringing the total number of certified inpatient products to nine, or an estimated 36 percent of inpatient EHR vendors.  The Commission’s focus for this first year of inpatient product testing is clinician order entry (often called CPOE or “Computerized Physician Order Entry”) and medication administration capabilities (often called eMAR or “Electronic Medication Administration Record”), because this area has the lowest rate of adoption in hospitals but has been shown to offer the highest value for improvement  of care.

The new CCHIT certified products are:

For a complete list of certified EHR products, visit www.cchit.org. The next application period for inpatient products will open February 1. The 2007 application period for ambulatory and inpatient EHR products will remain open until March 31.

Stark and anti-kickback exemptions resource

In August 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published rules providing an exception to the physician self-referral prohibition (commonly referred to as the Stark law) and a safe harbor under the anti-kickback statute. These provisions allow hospitals, health systems, health plans and others to donate EHR software to physicians and other healthcare practitioners under specified conditions, one of which is that the software must be interoperable.

As a resource for hospitals and physicians searching for EHR software that qualifies for these exemptions, the Certification Commission has listed Ambulatory EHR products that have been certified in the last 12 months on its Web site. Under rules published by HHS at www.hhs.gov/healthit/certification/stark/, EHR software is deemed to be interoperable if a certifying body recognized by the Secretary of HHS has certified the software no more than 12 months prior to the date it is provided to the physician recipient. The Certification Commission is an officially recognized certifying body.

The list of qualifying products is available at www.cchit.org/stark/.

Public comment period open

On January 17, the Certification Commission published the second draft of its certification criteria and the first draft of its test scripts for the 2008 certification year. In order to continue to refine and improve the proposed criteria and test steps, the Certification Commission has opened a 30-day public comment period, closing February 16, 2008. The criteria are available for review and comment at http://cchit.org/participate/public-comment/.

“With three more inpatient EHR products certified this quarter, as well as several more ambulatory products, our marketplace impact continues to grow,” said Mark Leavitt, M.D., chair of the Certification Commission.  “In addition, stakeholder engagement in our development process is stronger than ever, with almost 2,500 comments submitted in response to our first draft of the criteria,”

About the Certification Commission

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology is an independent, nonprofit organization that has been officially named by the federal government as a “recognized certification body” for electronic health record products.  Its mission is to accelerate the adoption of health information technology by creating a credible, sustainable product certification program.  The certification requirements are based on widely accepted industry standards and involve the work of hundreds of expert volunteers and input from a variety of stakeholders throughout the health care industry.  More information on the Commission and CCHIT CertifiedSM products is available at www.cchit.org.

“CCHITSM” and “CCHIT CertifiedSM” are service marks of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology.

About IHE

Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) (www.ihe.net) is a global initiative that creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly – from application to application, system to system, and setting to setting – across multiple healthcare enterprises. IHE brings together healthcare information technology stakeholders to implement standards for communicating patient information efficiently throughout and among healthcare enterprises by developing a framework for interoperability. Because of its proven process of collaboration, demonstration and real-world implementation of interoperable solutions, IHE is in a unique position to significantly accelerate the process for defining, testing and implementing standards-based interoperability among electronic health records systems.

About the MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation is a private, independent not-for-profit organization chartered to work solely in the public interest. MITRE manages three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. As a national resource, MITRE Corporation applies notable technical and management expertise in systems engineering, information technology, operational concepts, and enterprise modernization and are dedicated to improving the quality of our nation's healthcare through the transformation of healthcare enterprises. 

For more information about The MITRE Corporation and its work, visit www.mitre.org.

About NIST

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a non-regulatory federal agency. NIST's mission is to develop and promote measurement, standards, and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate trade, and improve the quality of life.  NIST's Information Technology Laboratory works with industry, research, and government organizations to make information technology more usable, more secure, more scalable, and more interoperable than it is today. NIST develops the test methods that both developers and users of technology need to objectively measure, compare and improve their systems. To this end, NIST is collaborating with the healthcare industry to advance the use of IT in healthcare systems.