PHILADELPHIA — Physicians purchasing an electronic health record will be able to consult a list of certified products as early as this summer, according to Dr. Mark Leavitt, chair of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology.
The certification commission planned to begin accepting applications from electronic health record (EHR) vendors in late April or early May and to publish a list of certified products and their developers in late June or early July.
The list, featuring the first batch of products with the certification commission's seal of approval, will be published on its Web site (www.cchit.org
The process of certification is voluntary and its success is dependent on acceptance in the marketplace, Dr. Leavitt said at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians. “We're not setting the bar above everyone's heads so that no products meet it,” he said. “But it is not trivial to have a product that meets the criteria.”
The certification commission was formed in 2004 by the American Health Information Management Association, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, and the National Alliance for Health Information Technology. In September 2005, the group received a 3-year contract from the Department of Health and Human Services to work on certification criteria for EHRs.
The certification commission is focusing first on certifying products for the ambulatory setting. In phase II, the certification commission will work on evaluating EHR products for the inpatient setting, and in phase III it will evaluate the infrastructure or network components for EHR interoperability.
Vendors will apply for certification and pay a testing fee. To keep costs down, the testing will be done virtually through an Internet browser. A three-person panel, including at least one practicing physician, will judge the demonstration of the product during a process that could take several hours to a day, Dr. Leavitt said.
It's unclear how many products will be certified in the first round, Dr. Leavitt added.
EHR products will be evaluated based on more than 250 functional requirements. But the commission is not in the business of designing EHRs, said Dr. Sarah T. Corley, cochair of the certification commission's functionality workgroup, and there will be some variability in the market.
The standards developed by the commission will set a baseline for what every physician needs in an EHR, but some subspecialists may need to work with vendors to add more functionality, she said.
For example, oncologists may want to customize EHR products to add functionality specific to the care they provide, Dr. Leavitt said. However, the work of the certification commission should be valuable to physicians in all specialties because it will help to narrow the field.
“You still need to do your homework,” Dr. Leavitt said, but certification will allow physicians to home in on the advanced level of functionality they need.