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January 08, 2010

iHealthBeat

CCHIT Offers Promise, but No Guarantee of 'Meaningful Use'

Although a rubber stamp from the Certification Commission for Health IT suggests that an electronic health record system is well on its way to meeting "meaningful use" criteria, the federal government has yet to indicate whether it will designate CCHIT as an official certifying body, Modern Healthcare reports.

Last week, the federal government released proposed rules describing how health care providers can demonstrate meaningful use of certified EHRs to qualify for incentive payments under the 2009 economic stimulus package.

CCHIT Certification: A Good First Step?

In a recent report, research firm KLAS found a great deal of variation in gaps between current EHR functionality and the recently proposed meaningful use rules.

The firm noted that EHR vendors with up-to-date CCHIT certifications were the closest to meeting the meaningful use requirements.

KLAS also found that most vendors fell short of the meaningful use criteria in areas that CCHIT certification does not emphasize, such as health data exchange and in-depth reporting.

Questions Remain

Despite its apparent similarities with meaningful use requirements, CCHIT certification is not a guarantee that an EHR system will enable users to qualify for incentive payments, according to federal officials.

Following the release of the proposed meaningful use rules, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal said it would be "premature to talk about the implications of any particular set of certification criteria that CCHIT or anybody else has put forward or will put forward" (Conn, Modern Healthcare, 1/8).

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is scheduled to release additional guidance on the EHR certification process later this year (iHealthbeat, 1/4).