ONC will announce “soon” the names of the authorized testing and certification bodies, Carol Bean, ONC's division director for certification and testing at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) said during a phone conference on Aug. 18.
Electronic health record vendors and providers alike are chomping at the bit to find out what organizations will be ATCBs, the only authorities that can certify EHR products for meaningful use, and thus allow providers to earn incentives under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Time is a factor weighing on the entire industry, with providers allowed to start collecting data in a meaningful way beginning Jan. 1.
Bean said after the ATCBs are approved, they will immediately attend a two-day training, and then they will be "open for business," using the testing criterion supplied by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Michelle Freed, vice president at McKesson in the stimulus program office said McKesson had hoped ONC would have the ATCBs up and running earlier, but that has not prevented McKesson from preparing EHRs for meaningful use and piloting them ahead of time with their hospital and physician customers.
"We have been following the certification process very closely and we have been preparing for quite some time," Freed said.
Freed said McKesson's biggest concern at this point is how long it will take the ATCBs to certify EHR products and how long the queue will be of EHR vendors applying for certification. "If ONC has misjudged the number of EHRs in the industry that need to be certified, the industry could really have a huge backlog," Freed said.
ONC would not disclose the names of the applicant ATCBs, Bean said.
However, the Austin, Texas-based Drummond Group, an interoperability testing company, and the nonprofit Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) have publicly announced their applications.
Prior to the passage of the stimulus package, CCHIT had certified some 200 electronic health record products, representing 75 percent of the marketplace, but not for meaningful use under ARRA. Bean made it clear that vendors with CCHIT-certified products prior to ARRA will not have an advantage over other EHR vendors when it comes to certification under the ATCBs.
Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO
of the American Hospital Association,
said the new ARRA certification process penalizes early EHR adopters by requiring them to upgrade or replace already functional systems.
"We continue to be concerned that, given limited vendor capacity and workforce shortages, many hospitals will not have timely access to certified products, since no certified EHR systems are available today," he said in a July 13 comment on the final meaningful use rule.
