Archive for the ‘CCHIT’ Category
January 06, 2011
Filed Under (ARRA, CCHIT, EHR, EMR, Electronic Health Records, Electronic Medical Records, Health, Hospital) by admin
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 5, 2011 January 5, 2011 – Integrated Systems Management Inc announced today that OmniMD™ EHR, Version 11.0 is 2011/2012 compliant and was certified as a Complete EHR on January 4, 2011 by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®), an ONC-ATCB, in accordance with the applicable (eligible provider) certification criteria adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The 2011/2012 criteria support the Stage 1 meaningful use measures required to qualify eligible providers and hospitals for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). According to Divan Dave, CEO, of OmniMD™ “This certification is another step in our commitment to provide providers with intuitive, easy-to-use, affordable technologies that help them improve patient care, reduce their costs and qualify for government incentives”. The ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification program tests and certifies that Complete EHRs meet all of the 2011/2012 criteria and EHR Modules meet one or more – but not all – of the criteria approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) for either eligible provider or hospital technology. “CCHIT is pleased to be testing and certifying products so that companies are now able to offer these products to providers who wish to purchase and implement certified EHR technology and achieve meaningful use in time for the 2011-2012 incentives,” said Karen M. Bell, M.D., M.S.S., Chair, CCHIT. OmniMD™ EHR, Version 11.0 certification number is CC-1112-484340-1. ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification conferred by CCHIT does not represent an endorsement of the certified EHR technology by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nor does it guarantee the receipt of incentive payments. The clinical quality measures to which OmniMD™ has been certified include: NQF 0421 - Adult Weight Screening & Follow-Up OmniMD™ EHR Version 11.0 is also certified in CCHIT’s separate and independently developed certification program. OmniMD™ Version 11.0 is a pre-market CCHIT Certified® 2011, Ambulatory EHR. Integrated Systems Management Inc. has certified its EHR technology in both programs to provide greater assurance to its customers. About Integrated Systems Management, Inc Founded in 2000, OmniMD™ integrated Electronic Health Records and Practice Management (PMS) products and services, offers unparalleled reliability, ease-of-use, efficiency and customizability. OmniMD™ Ambulatory EHR has also earned a designation as a pre-market CCHIT 2011 Certification with the highest 5 Star Usability Rating ensuring OmniMD™ commitment to have a comprehensive, secure, scalable, intuitive and interoperable EHR system. OmniMD™ Ambulatory EHR Version 11.0 is CCHIT 2011 Pre-Market Certified, web-enabled and support devices ranging from Tablet PCs to Smart phones. OmniMD™ offers a comprehensive set of services such as Health Transcriptions, Document Management, Patient Portal, Patient Reminder and Eligibility Verification as part of an integrated solution under one roof helping practices to effectively addressing their financial, administrative, clinical, and regulatory needs. OmniMD™ Ambulatory EHR Version 11.0 is built as a true Software as a Service solution. It can be deployed as an Enterprise or a Subscription based Service as per the practice requirements. OmniMD™ is designed to exceed the present and future needs of the healthcare industry. OmniMD™ is robust, scalable, interoperable, secure, intuitive and customizable with rapid deployment model. OmniMD™ EHR has also achieved Surescripts® Gold Solution Provider status, which allows for interoperability with the nation’s community pharmacies - improving the safety, efficiency and quality of the prescribing process. Gold Solution Provider status is granted to vendors whose software products have surpassed Surescripts’ baseline product certification, by demonstrating a higher level of commitment to e-prescribing, enhanced security, excellent customer support and service. OmniMD™ is a division of Integrated Systems Management, Inc. – ISM Inc. - (www.ismnet.com) a leader in Software Development and Information Technology Consulting since 1989. About CCHIT The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) is an independent, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with the public mission of accelerating the adoption of robust, interoperable health information technology. The Commission has been certifying electronic health record technology since 2006 and is approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as an Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB). More information on CCHIT, CCHIT Certified® products and ONC-ATCB certified electronic health record technology is available at http://cchit.org. About ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification The ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification program tests and certifies that EHR technology is capable of meeting the 2011/2012 criteria approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). The certifications include Complete EHRs, which meet all of the 2011/2012 criteria for either eligible provider or hospital technology and EHR Modules, which meet one or more – but not all – of the criteria. ONC-ATCB certification aligns with Health Information Technology: Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications, and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Record Technology published in the Federal Register in July 2010 and strictly adheres to the test procedures published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the time of testing. ONC-ATCB 2011/2012 certification conferred by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) does not represent an endorsement of the certified EHR technology by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services nor does it guarantee the receipt of incentive payments. “CCHIT®” and “CCHIT Certified®” are registered trademarks of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology.
February 25, 2010
Certified medical software can help doctors increase profit and improve patient care. But how do you know if software is “certified”, and why does it matter?? For one thing, if medical records are going to go digital, it’s essential for state and federal governments to develop sensible, well-defined regulations.
The idea is ostensibly to encourage the adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) software systems that provide highly reliable, efficient recordkeeping, and which also protect patient safety and privacy – all the while eliminating sub-standard systems that could compromise the integrity of healthcare facilities by violating a patient’s right to privacy.
Certified EMR adoption is encouraged in part by provisions in the stimulus law that call for Medicaid penalties – that is, cuts in reimbursements for healthcare facilities that choose not to adopt a certified EMR software system. A recent report from the PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute predicts that these Medicaid penalties could ultimately do more to encourage physicians to adopt certified EMRs than other incentives, including cash for purchasing and implementation.
Medicare and Medicaid are also offering maximum bonuses of $44,000 and $63,750, respectively, to help individual healthcare facilities adopt certified EMRs. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is responsible for choosing the criteria that will separate qualified EMR software systems from those that will not be eligible to receive incentives, and they have already announced that there will be multiple certification bodies, but each one will be required to certify EMRs using criteria specified by the HHS.
Although the development of the exact criteria is still part of an ongoing process, the Health IT Advisory Committee – a group responsible for advising the HHS – has announced that they will ‘grandfather in’ vendors that obtained certification for software systems in 2008 from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT). Ultimately, it seems that physicians will be able to move ahead with confidence to implement new digital recordkeeping systems – as long as they take the time to ask the tough questions and understand all of the rules before jumping into the game.
Above Article publish on http://www.medicalsoftware.com/blog/medical-software-general-information/pid-226/certified-medical-software-why-does-it-matter/
December 01, 2009
Patty Enrado, Contributing Editor
Long before ARRA, more than five years ago, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center began a $50 million electronic medical record initiative. This past summer, UCSF reportedly wrote off a third of that cost and scrapped its contract with the EMR vendor. The EMR system reportedly had technical difficulties that never enabled it to be fully functional. Undeterred, UCSF is forging ahead with its goal of digitizing its patient records, which says a lot about its faith in EMRs.
UCSF Medical Center isn’t the first healthcare system to have a costly, disastrous experience, and it won’t be the last. Industry stakeholders, however, need to work together to ensure that the number of failures dwindle significantly.
The most important thing that the EHR/EMR market can do for itself is to be transparent. If there is no transparency, how can healthcare systems perform accurate due diligence? There’s a business reason for non-disclosure clauses in sales contracts, which prevent purchasers from reporting problems with the health IT vendor or their products, and “hold harmless” clauses, which exempt vendors from any liability. It may guarantee a risk-free business environment for the health IT vendor, but it hurts the EMR market and eventually hurts the health IT vendor’s reputation. Clinicians and healthcare organization executives may be obligated to remain silent about the product and/or the vendor’s problems, but they will talk informally to their counterparts in other healthcare organizations. You’ve heard the complaints. You know which health IT companies did what to whom.
Transparency need not be the enemy of health IT companies if they have solid products and customer support. For those that have had problems - and I’m not saying they have bad products or customer support - it’s a business imperative to fix those problems. There are less-expensive, more flexible EMR solutions that have come into the market in the last year. There will be other UCSF Medical Centers that cut off their legacy vendor and start anew.
There are some in the industry who say so long as the federal stimulus incentives help subsidize the purchase of legacy systems the problems will continue. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Ross Koppel believes the federal government should have put that money to use by developing “more usable and more responsible software.” I think that route would have been successful as a first step, though I still believe in the incentives. There are some who believe the federal government should regulate the EMR industry. If that sounds odious, then perhaps the EMR industry ought to regulate itself.
As for healthcare providers, they need to understand the enormity of the task. What I mean is that they need to not only put up the cash for the initiative but dedicate human resources to the initiative. Dedicate a team, if that is what is required.
I’d be remiss not to mention that for every UCSF there is a UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) - large healthcare systems that have successfully implemented big-budget EMRs and are reaping administrative and clinical benefits. The problem is there aren’t enough of them. And that’s why there is hesitation among healthcare systems. As an industry, let’s try to increase those success stories.
Above article published on http://www.healthcareitnews.com/blog/how-healthcare-industry-can-increase-number-successful-ehremr-initiatives
November 25, 2009
By Neil Versel
Without EMRs, PHRs and health information exchange, the patient-centered medical home may not be bound to fail, but it certainly is difficult to establish and maintain. “IT is really the key to supporting the doctor/patient relationship and making it more efficient, safer and more effective,” Dr. Paul Grundy, president of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, tells Health Data Management. The Washington-based organization advocates the medical home, under which a primary-care physician manages and coordinates care on behalf of patients, with an eye toward prevention and management of chronic diseases.
It may be a challenge to implement the medical-home model under current reimbursement systems, but until payers start rewarding physicians for keeping patients healthy, IT may be the best avenue. EMRs with clinical decision support, PHRs that help patients monitor their own conditions and health information exchange to support care coordination all can help establish a team approach to care and treatment, HDM reports.
“This is simply about restructuring the way healthcare is delivered to catch the efficiency of technology,” adds Grundy, who also is director of heathcare transformation at IBM.
Above article published on http://www.fierceemr.com/story/emrs-phrs-hie-necessary-support-patient-centered-medical-home/2009-11-12
September 21, 2009
Advisory panel considers privacy proposals
By Alice Lipowicz A federal advisory panel today heard several proposals about how to best protect patient privacy while creating and sharing electronic health records (EHRs).
The Health Information Technology Policy Committee convened to prepare recommendations to the Health and Human Services Department on distributing $19 billion in economic stimulus funding for incentive payments for EHRs and health information exchanges. The bulk of the money will go to doctors and hospitals that buy certified record systems and participate in the exchanges. HHS is expected to issue a rule by year’s end.
Dr. Deborah Peel, founder of the Coalition for Patient Privacy, said the core of privacy is patient control of the information in EHRs.
“The right to privacy and control is the national consensus,” Peel said, “It reflects centuries of medical ethics. We are asking you to set a high bar for privacy to meet with patients’ expectations.”
She suggested patients should be allowed to consent, or not consent, to each disclosure of the information, and for the information to be segmented to maintain different levels of disclosure for different pieces of information. Industry does not want to change its practices, so it is best if regulations are created to enforce patient consent management rules, she added.
However, patient consent, by itself, has not proven to be effective tool, asserted Deven McGraw, a member of the advisory panel and director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“Although the concept of patient control is very appealing, consent does not work the way we want it to,” McGraw said. “Consent does not provide protection.”
That is because health insurers often require blanket consent forms in which patients authorize a very broad variety of uses and disclosures that are not well understood by patient, she said. Patients don’t really have a choice, because if they don’t sign the consent form, the insurer will deny coverage, McGraw said.
The solution is to include patient consent in a comprehensive framework of technical and legal standards for IT systems, networks, practices and training, along with other features, she said.
The committee also heard discussions about the use, disclosure, secondary use and stewardship of the personal health data. It also is considering audits and accountability for the EHR systems and models for data exchange, data storage, data de-identification and re-identification.
In July, a separate advisory committee to HHS, the Health IT Standards Committee, considered specific recommendations for patient privacy that included encryption, strong access controls and audits.
Above article published on
September 17, 2009
BY MARK WULKAN, M.D. The electronic medical record (EMR) is slowly transforming the way doctors, nurses, and other health care providers deliver patient care. Patients financial records have been electronic for decades; however, clinical data (the information entered by doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals) has been lagging. Processes for capturing lab and radiology results, history and physical details, operative reports, discharge summaries and other critical data have been very basic; paper charts remain the primary means of documentation and communication among the health care team.
Today, some hospitals are creating comprehensive EMRs for their patients that include the documentation and orders entered by all health care professionals. These EMR systems help:
Make it easier to access and share patient information among doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and other health care professionals, regardless of whether they’re in the same unit, on separate floors or even away from the hospital. For example, if the doctor caring for your child in the hospital gets a call after she’s home, she can access nearly all the information in your child’s medical chart via her home computer (with the appropriate security clearance).
Allow your physician to order medications and procedures with the added benefit of EMR system “guard rails” that generate alerts to prevent errors, such as an overdose, giving a medication your child is allergic to, or prescribing drugs that are incompatible.
EMR systems designed for offices perform many of the same functions, just on a smaller scale.
Most of the top medical centers in metro Atlanta have implemented or are in the process of implementing a comprehensive EMR. Yet, the transition to comprehensive EMRs has been slow. In fact, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year found that only four percent of physicians had a comprehensive EMR and 13 percent had a basic system. The primary barriers have been cost and time. Over the next several years, you should see an increase. The federal government is encouraging hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices to do so and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes stimulus money to help offset part of the cost.
In the future, as more EMR software manufacturers adopt international standards, your records will be electronically available from nearly any medical facility that you and your family visit. For example, if your child gets sick on vacation in Florida, you will be able to grant access to his pediatrician’s records and any previous hospitalization records to the Emergency Room doctor taking care of him. In addition, your pediatrician will be alerted and have the ability to access information about the ER visit. The details of how this will work are still being discussed, but this is the goal.
Above article published on
September 17, 2009
Filed Under (CCHIT, EHR, EMR, Electronic Health Records, Electronic Medical Records, Health) by admin
By Joseph Conn / HITS staff writer
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
September 17, 2009
Time to take a look at the costs associated with the 2011 CCHIT Certification programs. If you’re not sure which programs I’m talking about, you need to go read my post about Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 and CCHIT Certified 2011.
The following are the costs that CCHIT plans to charge for their 2011 EHR certifications: CCHIT Certified 2011 Ambulatory EHR – $37,000 with a $9,000 annual renewal CCHIT Certified 2011 Inpatient EHR – $49,000 with a $9,000 annual renewal CCHIT Certified 2011 Emergency Department – $37,000 with a $9,000 annual renewal CCHIT Certified 2011 ePrescribing – $18,000 with a $9,000 annual renewal
Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 1-2 modules – $6,000 with a $1,000 annual renewal Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 3-5 modules – $10,000 with a $2,000 annual renewal Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 6-10 modules – $15,000 with a $3,000 annual renewal Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 11-20 modules – $24,000 with a $4,000 annual renewal Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 >20 modules – $33,000 with a $5,000 annual renewal *These are estimates subject to final approval
Of course, the ones that matter most are the CCHIT Certified 2011 Ambulatory EHR for $37,000 and the Preliminary ARRA Certified 2011 >20 modules for $33,000. Why? These are the two certifications that most people care about. If you’re an EHR vendor, then you’re going to want to do one of these two options (Assuming you’re going to go with CCHIT certification. More on that later.). These are the two options which should eventually be recognized as the certified EHR requirement for the ARRA EHR stimulus money.
Which CCHIT Certification Should I Do? The question an EHR vendor has to make is which of these two certifications make sense. Will having CCHIT Certified 2011 help you to sell more EHR software than just being Preliminary ARRA Certified? I’m guessing that it probably won’t. Most people I’ve seen really just want to make sure they get the ARRA stimulus money to pay for their EHR. Plus, with either certification you’ll be able to honestly tell a clinic that you have a “certified EHR.” Most doctors won’t know or care about the difference in the certification types.
Many might think that it’s only a $4,000 difference between the Preliminary ARRA 2011 certification and the CCHIT Certified 2011 so why not just get the later. It is interesting that the costs are so close to each other. However, remember that this isn’t the only cost associated with becoming certified. One EMR vendor I talked to put the software development costs to become CCHIT Certified in the six figures. We won’t know for sure until CCHIT publishes the final certification criteria, but I project that the CCHIT Certified requirements will number close to 300 while the Preliminary ARRA requirements will be close to 100. That’s a huge difference in development costs to meet 200 more requirements which your customers may or may not find useful.
Some might use the CCHIT Certified 2011 to try and assure potential buyers that they’ll have a more successful EMR implementation because of this certification. Many might actually believe it, but unfortunately there’s no evidence to prove this is actually the case.
EHR vendors should also be aware that CCHIT is looking at doing a site certification as well. This might be a better option for some EHR vendors who work with people who have few people actually interested in the EHR stimulus money.
Other EHR Certification Options Beyond CCHIT It’s still too early to know for sure if other EHR certifying bodies are going to be created to handle the HHS certification requirements for EHR. However, I’m willing to bet that at least a couple will be created.
Basically, CCHIT has set the price for EHR ARRA certification at $33,000 with a $5,000 annual renewal. I could be wrong, but that seems like a lot of money to certify a piece of software. I’m guessing that some entrepreneurial folks will find a way to do it for cheaper. Could you certify 100 EMR vendors for less than $3.3 million? We’ll see what ONC/NIST requires from a certification organization, but seems like a pretty nice business model to me.
For EMR vendors, this is important because competition amongst certifying bodies will most certainly drive the cost of EMR certification down. Then, the PR battle between CCHIT and the new certifying bodies will begin. Basically, this could be really interesting to watch if someone else decides to join the EHR certifying fray.
Above article published on http://www.emrandhipaa.com/emr-and-hipaa/2009/09/14/cost-of-new-cchit-ehr-certifications/
September 15, 2009
Diana Manos, Senior Editor
The Department of Health and Human Services issued new regulations Wednesday requiring healthcare providers, health plans and other entities covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to notify patients if their electronic health information has been breached.
The regulations are mandated by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, passed as part of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) last February.
Developed by the HHS Office for Civil Rights, they require healthcare providers and other HIPAA “covered entities” to promptly notify people whose health records have been breached, as well as the HHS Secretary and the media in cases where a breach affects more than 500.
Covered entities include doctors, clinics, psychologists, dentists, chiropractors, nursing homes and pharmacies – if they transmit any information in an electronic form using a standard that HHS has adopted.
According to the OCR, the rule also applies to health insurance companies, HMOs, company health plans and government programs that pay for healthcare, such as Medicare, Medicaid and the military and veterans’ health care programs. It includes healthcare clearinghouses that process non-standard health information received from another entity into a standard electronic format or data content, or vice versa.
“This new federal law ensures that covered entities and business associates are accountable to the department and to individuals for proper safeguarding of the private information entrusted to their care,” said Robinsue Frohboese, acting director and principal deputy director of the OCR. “These protections will be a cornerstone of maintaining consumer trust as we move forward with meaningful use of electronic health records and electronic exchange of health information.”
HHS officials said they developed the regulations after taking public comment last April and under “close consultation” with the Federal Trade Commission). The FTC has issued its own breach notification regulations that apply to vendors of personal health records and certain others not covered by HIPAA.
To help providers to determine when information is “unsecured” and notification is required by the HHS and FTC rules, HHS is also issuing an update to its guidance on encryption and destruction of technologies that are no longer usable. Providers that are subject to the HHS and FTC regulations that secure electronic health records according to HHS guidance through encryption or destruction are relieved from having to notify in the event of a breach. This guidance will be updated annually.
The HHS interim final regulations on breach notification will be effective 30 days after they are published in the Federal Register and will include a 60-day public comment period.
Above article published on http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/hhs-issues-rule-ehr-breach-notification
September 01, 2009
By Ken Terry While the debate over “meaningful use” of electronic health records rages on, it has been easy to forget the other half of the requirement for getting government health IT subsidies: Physicians and hospitals must use “qualified” EHRs.
Since the passage of the HITECH Act, part of last spring’s stimulus package, there has been speculation that a qualified EHR would have to be certified by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), which so far has been the only game in town. But the Health IT Advisory Committee, which advises the Department of Health and Human Services on information technology matters, has decided that there should be multiple certification bodies. All of them would have to certify EHRs under criteria developed by HHS.
According to the work group that made the recommendations approved by the whole committee, CCHIT’s criteria for certification are too detailed and the organization is too close to the industry to be the only certifying entity. Other observers have pointed out that CCHIT is very close to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), a trade association for health IT professionals that include many software vendors among its members. In addition, Mark Leavitt, MD, chair of CCHIT, used to be a HIMSS executive and, before that, led an EHR company. However, there is no evidence that CCHIT’s ties with HIMSS have influenced its approach to certification, which has been implemented by workgroups that include a wide range of industry professionals.
In any case, CCHIT plans to certify EHRs under the criteria that will be established by HHS. Meanwhile, the advisory committee has asked CCHIT to submit a proposal for developing a “Preliminary HHS Certification” process that would allow it to provide preliminary certification to EHR vendors so that providers can begin purchasing qualified products, perhaps as early as October. In addition, the committee approved a plan to grandfather in vendors that have 2008 CCHIT certification, with the proviso that they upgrade their products later.
In a signifier of what this debate is really about, the committee has approved the certification of “open-source” EHRs, which contain non-proprietary code that is available to anyone who wants to use it. The best-known example in the healthcare arena is the VA system’s Vista EHR, which has been available to software developers for a number of years. In addition, the comment about CCHIT’s criteria being too detailed suggests that the committee wants to use looser criteria under which less advanced (and less expensive) EHRs could qualify for government aid.
I applaud this decision on a couple of grounds: First, continuing to tighten criteria for “qualified” EHRs would help a dozen or so vendors consolidate their hold on the market as providers sought EHRs that could garner government aid. Second, physicians don’t need all of the bells and whistles in current EHRs to improve health care. Relaxing the criteria in certain respects would help the development of nontraditional community EHRs, including those linked to disease registries, that might serve the purpose better. But as HHS develops its criteria, it should bear in mind that the EHRs that are qualified for government subsidies must also help doctors demonstrate meaningful use.
Above article published on http://industry.bnet.com/healthcare/10001008/hhs-will-choose-criteria-for-ehr-certification/
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