Health IT commission restructures EHR certification program
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) has announced it is expanding and realigning its program to certify technology used in electronic health records systems.
The health IT industry created CCHIT to help ensure the compatibility of health IT products. Officials said the reorganization will help the commission focus on new application areas such as emergency room and geriatric medicine.
CCHIT will add two workgroups to develop certification tests for products associated with emergency room care and health information networks, officials said. A new foundation workgroup will distill practices across multiple care and use settings.
The three new workgroups will supplement two existing groups that have spent the past two years developing tests for EHR technologies in ambulatory or outpatient care settings and in inpatient settings, respectively. The latest criteria for ambulatory care tests are scheduled to take effect May 1.
CCHIT said it will also reorganize the network of professionals who serve on its technical committees on a voluntary basis.
The commission will create several new expert panels to advise the workgroups. The panels will focus on areas of general interest to the workgroups, such as privacy, interoperability, security, and children's, geriatric and cardiovascular medicine.
"Volunteers, who are responsible for CCHIT's successes, are finding their time spread thinner than ever," said Dr. Mark Leavitt, the commission's chairman, in a statement. "I believe we must use those resources even more efficiently this year, making fewer demands on their time while gaining the maximum benefit from their expertise."
CCHIT officials said the reorganization was necessary to expand certification along new clinical avenues and to synchronize the process across workgroups.
"The workgroup structure has been the same since the commission began its work in 2005," said Sue Reber, the commission's communications director. "We're taking a more reasonable look at how we use the structure, not just for now but for some future expansion as well."
CCHIT eventually wants to get all of its workgroups to produce their test sets in sync.
To date, the ambulatory workgroup has gone through two complete rounds of certification development, Reber said. The goal is to have the ambulatory group deliver its third set of criteria, the inpatient workgroup deliver its second iteration and the new network group its first set of tests by July 2008. That would help smooth out the certification process for vendors, she said.