CCHIT made its announcement during the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s 2010 conference in Atlanta (Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek, 3/2).

The American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists will collaborate with CCHIT in creating the criteria for the certification program.

CCHIT said it will begin recruiting voluntary work group members through its Web site from March 16 through April 16. The commission will announce the work group members in June (Goedert, Health Data Management, 3/1).

The women’s health and oncology certification tracks are among several of CCHIT’s programs that target medical specialties (InformationWeek, 3/2).

Above article publish on http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2010/3/2/cchit-to-certify-ehr-systems-for-womens-health-oncology-care.aspx

Appointing a chief privacy officer is one of the main moves detailed in a notice published in the Federal Register. The notice is dated Nov. 20, but the changes are effective as of Dec. 1.

The reorganization is part of the preparations called for in federal health IT stimulus legislation to support physicians and hospitals to become meaningful users of electronic health records and be eligible for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments starting in 2011.

ONC’s reorganization below the top leadership is designed to “more effectively” accomplish the tasks in the HITECH Act, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who signed the notice.

The chief privacy officer, who will be named by the secretary, is a new role. In addition to advising the national health coordinator on privacy, security and data stewardship of electronic health information, the privacy officer will coordinate similar efforts with other federal, state and regional agencies and also with foreign countries.

Since its creation in 2004, ONC has been arranged around health IT adoption, interoperability and standards, programs and coordination, and policy and research.

The new organizational lines, other than the chief privacy officer, are:

• The Office of Economic Modeling and Analysis, which replaces the health IT adoption Component, will apply statistical approaches and economic analyses to health IT investments and policy to support its strategy, such as cost reductions resulting from the adoption of electronic health records.

• The Office of the Chief Scientist, which replaces the interoperability and standards group, will evaluate health IT grant programs, identify and track innovations and lead research in the area. The office, which will have staff with special knowledge of medical bioinformatics, will develop education programs and collaborate with other agencies to assess new health IT programs.

• The Office of the Deputy National Coordinator for Programs and Policy, which replaces the programs and coordination component, will oversee grant programs that promote meaningful use of interoperable health IT for individual and population health.

It will also develop the approaches for establishing the standards needed for nationwide health information exchange and policy for privacy and security for health data. It will coordinate programs among HHS agencies and other federal and public health agencies to lessen duplication.

The Office of the Deputy National Coordinator for Operations, which replaces the policy and research group, performs activities that support ONC programs, such as budget formulation, contract and grants management and financial and staff planning.

Above article published http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/onc-reorganizes-push-ehr-hitech-goals

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology next year plans to develop a “site certification” program for hospitals and physician groups that use self-developed EHRs or a mix of commercial and proprietary applications, says Mark Leavitt, M.D., chair of the Chicago-based organization. The effort also will offer certification for those organizations that use an older, commercial clinical system that’s been heavily customized, he notes.

Although it has not yet been officially designated as an official EHR certifying body under the incentive program called for in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, CCHIT already is developing a new certification program designed to measure whether software is compliant with the yet-to-be-finalized federal “meaningful use” EHR standards. The site certification component will feature sliding-scale pricing to make it affordable to providers of various sizes, Leavitt says.

“Site certification is designed to help the early adopters who were EHR pioneers,” Leavitt adds.

The site certification effort won’t start until the middle of next year once the final “meaningful use” rules are enacted. CCHIT, however, will begin accepting applications Oct. 7 for its “ARRA 2011 Certification” program for vendors’ EHRs. That program is based on the proposed rules the government expects to publish in December.

Government regulators are considering a proposal to authorize multiple EHR certification programs. Leavitt says he’s confident the government will designate CCHIT as an official certifier of meaningful use for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR incentive programs. He also says it’s “not clear why others would want to launch” certification efforts. He points out that CCHIT is a not-for-profit group and contends that it would be difficult for others to start from scratch and cover their costs, much less make a profit.

CCHIT also is continuing with its longstanding effort to certify vendors’ EHRs for meeting a set of criteria much broader than the anticipated “meaningful use” standards. The criteria for the updated “CCHIT Certified 2011″ program will become “more rigorous,” Leavitt says. For example, vendors will need to prove that the application has been up and running at two sites for at least 45 days. Plus certifiers will, for the first time, assess the “usability” of EHR software for ambulatory care settings.

Above article published on

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The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology is adopting a two-tier system of testing and certifying IT systems.

In a conference call with vendors and developers of health IT systems Thursday, CCHIT Chairman Mark Leavitt announced the not-for-profit organization’s new testing program, as the group readies itself for the new realities of the healthcare IT market since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

One testing and certification program, dubbed Preliminary ARRA 2011 Certification, will specifically test for compliance with what is expected to be—at least initially—a fairly limited set of criteria that HHS and the CMS will use to determine eligibility by hospitals and office-based physicians for an estimated $34 billion in federal subsidy payments for the purchase of EHRs under the stimulus law.

The other, the so-called CCHIT Certified 2011 testing program, will use an elaborate set of about 300 criteria, primarily developed by the organization since its founding, that will closely resemble previous CCHIT testing and certification programs. The core CCHIT criteria will be tweaked to ensure systems that pass muster for its more advanced testing program also will meet ARRA requirements.

When it began testing IT systems in 2006, and on through 2008, CCHIT had offered just one, gold-standard set of criteria for each type of EHR system it tested—ambulatory EHRs or inpatient EHRs, for example.

But by April, CCHIT announced it would halt further testing to adapt its systems to accommodate the stimulus law criteria, development of which remains a work in progress. At the time of the announcement, Leavitt said the organization would keep its full-featured certification program, but would add two new testing and certification regimes scaled down to meet the minimum requirements of the stimulus law.

One new program would have tested IT systems by “module” against the new criteria under the recovery act, which requires providers to put “certified” EHR systems to “meaningful use” in order to qualify for federal subsidy payments. The proposed new modular approach was expected to appeal to some physician office practices and, more commonly, to hospitals, that want to piece together a comprehensive IT system from component parts produced by multiple IT vendors.

The other new CCHIT regime would have offered “on-site” testing and certification of EHR systems—again, against the less stringent stimulus law criteria with an eye toward qualifying for federal subsidies. This form of testing would have been conducted on systems installed at physician offices or hospitals. It was an approach targeted to appeal to providers who have developed their own EHRs or planned to assemble an EHR from noncertified sources, and to the open source development community, according to CCHIT.

According to Leavitt Thursday, CCHIT’s testing scheme will be modified again, but only somewhat. While site certification has been dropped as a certification scheme in and of itself, “site certification is still there,” Leavitt said. “In Preliminary ARRA Certification 2011, you can get a product or a site certified.”

Leavitt said it’s unclear whether providers adopting EHRs that have passed the test under the more rigorous CCHIT Certified 2011 program would want on-site certification, but if there is demand for the service, CCHIT will provide it.

Starting in June and running through its latest report in August, the HIT Policy Committee, which was created under the recovery act, has issued three sets of recommended definitions of meaningful use. Some of those recommendations have been controversial. To have market relevance, however, any program of certification of EHR systems that CCHIT develops must take those meaningful use standards into consideration to ensure that certified systems will enable providers to meet meaningful use standards and qualify for federal subsidies. The meaningful use standards, ultimately, will be developed by the CMS, which is tasked with running the bulk of the EHR subsidy program through Medicare and Medicaid.

In addition, CCHIT has to keep an eye on the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, which, on behalf of the HHS secretary, will issue its own certification criteria for EHR systems, since, to qualify for subsidies under the stimulus law, providers also have to use “certified” EHR systems. Leavitt said CCHIT is forecasting ONC will issue its final rule on certification standards by Dec. 31 this year and that they probably will be the same or perhaps even less stringent than the recommendations the HIT Standards Committee made to ONC in August.

“We believe the final requirements will be the same as or less stringent that the current recommendations,” Leavitt said.

Both CCHIT testing and certification programs will open for vendor applications Oct. 7. Duration of certification is expected to run though Dec. 31, 2012, when certification criteria under the ARRA are expected to be ratcheted up, becoming both more numerous and more stringent.

Fees for certifying systems will vary with the certification scheme and the product, according to CCHIT Executive Director Alisa Ray. Under the CCHIT Certified 2011 program, the fee to a vendor to certify an EHR is $37,000 for either an ambulatory-care or an emergency department system, $49,000 for an inpatient system and $18,000 for an electronic prescribing system. Annual renewal costs are $9,000 for each, except e-prescribing, which is $7,000.

For Preliminary ARRA 2011 Certification, costs are pegged to the number of modules being tested, with fees set at $6,000 for one or two modules, $10,000 for three to five, $15,000 for six to 10, $24,000 for 11 to 20 and $33,000 for more than 20. Annual updates range from $1,000 to $5,000.

According to EHR vendor representative Justin Barnes, who listened in on Thursday’s CCHIT call, CCHIT probably has hit on the right strategy by launching its new testing and certification program this fall, based on an educated guess at what the government’s criteria might be, but before the final rules are published. Barnes is the chairman of the Electronic Health Record Association, and a vice president overseeing corporate development, marketing and government affairs for Greenway Medical Technologies, a Carrolton, Ga.-based EHR system developer.

“The detail that we have right now around meaningful use, you really can’t write a product to it,” Barnes said. “The interim final rule will come down at the end of this year. I think that will be a fairly close definition that we could follow. I think it will be plenty to work off of. The certification process, I believe, will be tweaked a little bit as well.”

Barnes said he hopes Leavitt is right when he predicts the ONC and the CMS will not vary too far from the current recommendations in writing the preliminary rules. He also said he hopes they don’t dally in unveiling their preliminary rules so everyone involved, both EHR vendors and users, have time enough to act.

“If there are any discrepancies, that could pose an interest to some people if you have to do heavy product development,” Barnes said. “It takes 12-plus months for the product cycle to add functionality on the ambulatory side and 18-plus months on the inpatient side. There is a word of caution here. That’s why we’ve urged ONC to move on this as fast as they can.”

Above article published on

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090904/REG/309049989/0