The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and the Drummond Group have been named the first two bodies designated by the ONC to test and certify EHRs, with expectations that there are more Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ONC-ATCBs) to come. Now what?
Vendor execs spoken to by Healthcare IT News were pleased with the news. And they all indicated that making the most of the moment is priority number one.
"We're delighted that ONC has named them, and done it on the schedule that they'd set," said Mark Segal, director, government and industry affairs at GE Health IT. "We're also pleased that ONC, from what we understand, shortly after naming them held training for both groups [to ensure] a high degree of consistency both across the groups and with the certification criteria."
Some execs would rather not go to those lengths. "We would prefer that there would be one certifying body, for consistency," said Wyche "Tee" Green, president and CEO of Greenway, "but there are two and there are going to be more, so those are things we're going to have to be prepared for."
On the other hand, says Mark Philips, vice president of product management at Sage, "we’re a little surprised that initially only two vendors were named. We're expecting quite a few large vendors that are going to be applying for certification, so we're hoping there's not going to be a big backlog that will take longer for all the vendors to get certified."
Segal agrees that moving with dispatch and clarity of purpose will be essential.
"What's critical – and we've conveyed this to CMS and ONC and NIST, and we're confident they understand it – is that for the certification process to move as quickly as they intend, it's important that outstanding questions that have been raised in the industry about the meaning of particular certification criteria or some of the NIST test methods and some issues of how certification will work in practice need to be resolved very, very quickly," he says. "They really affect a lot about both how our customers are planning and how we plan our certification strategy. We and other vendors."
Segal seems confident that the path to certification will be relatively free of hurdles. "Having been CCHIT certified [prior to it being named an ONC-ATCB] has put us in a good position from a product and roadmap standpoint," he says. "But nonetheless – and CCHIT has recently made this clear – we will need to fully certify anew against the final certification criteria and against the NIST test methods that have been designed to test against those criteria."
Rohit Nayak, vice president at MedPlus, the health IT subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics, agrees that past experience with CCHIT “is probably an advantage for people who have done this before because they understand the rigors of the process."
But he thinks it’s a good thing that prior certification doesn't just translate to a rubber stamp, now that the certifying body has the ONC imprimatur, since "a lot of the requirements that came out in the last year as a result of ONC and HHS direction were different from what existed at CCHIT before."
Moreover the fact that "vendors, large or small, will have to run through this certification process again is a good thing from a quality standpoint – the better to win the confidence of customers, he says. "From an industry standpoint, this whole process was put in place to build in some lowest common denominators, if you will."
That's "a harsh way of saying it," he confesses, but notes that it's imperative that not just "anybody who applies and goes through this process" gets certified. "We're watching that carefully," says Nayak. "Because if we don't get this right as an industry, we've lost whatever benefit we all collectively thought we'd achieve."
