The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will announce the names of the authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCB) "soon," according to Carol Bean, ONC's division director for certification and testing.
In a phone conference on ATCBs Wednesday, Bean said ONC officials are still reviewing the "handful" of applications and are likely to announce the approved ATCBs "sometime before the end of the summer." Bean could not name an exact date.
Electronic health record vendors and providers alike are chomping at the bit to find out what organizations will be ATCBs. ATCBs will be 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 playing 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 session in Washington, D.C. to guide them on how to certify EHRs in a uniform way. The testing criterion has been supplied by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as mandated under ARRA.
After the training in Washington, the ATCBs will be "open for business" at their discretion, Bean said. "Everybody is interested in moving as quickly as possible. We can't mandate a response time for the ATCBs, nor would we really want to."
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 the company 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.
Both 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 said 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.
According to Bean, ONC plans to launch a website that will aggregate all ATCB-certified products. The Certified Health IT Product List, or CHPL, will help providers find which systems, and versions of EHR products are certified for meaningful use.
