The U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has scheduled a free webinar on August 25 to provide an overview of its temporary certification program for electronic health records (EHR) software.
The webinar offers the opportunity for participants to directly ask questions of Carol Bean, PhD, director of the ONC's certification division.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD, has formally approved 45 testing procedures designed to determine if electronic health record products meet "meaningful use" criteria. These were published in the Federal Register on August 9 and may be accessed by clicking here.
Some of the approved procedures are applicable to RIS and PACS products, such as procedures to record demographics, clinical decision support, computerized provider order entry, encryption, integrity, authentication, audit logs, and automatic log off.
The testing procedures will be used to certify EHR applications or EHR modules by the ONC. Certification is intended to provide assurance that products offer the necessary technological capability, functionality, and security to meet the meaningful use criteria established in the final rule published by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in July.
In an initial webinar held on August 18, Bean said that the ONC expects to announce the first set of authorized testing and certification bodies by the end of the summer, and for the first wave of certified products to be available by early fall. During the webinar's question and answer session, more than one vendor participant expressed skepticism of the accuracy of this timeline and requested that a more specific definition of "early fall" be announced at the August 25 session.
Responding to a question about whether proprietary "homegrown" EHR modules or systems will receive less priority for timely testing than commercial products, Bean stated that the intent of the ONC was to have certifying entities treat these equally.
Bean also said that the ONC will maintain a regularly updated "certified HIT product list" on its website as a single source of all certified complete EHR and EHR modules reported by certifying entities to the ONC national coordinator.
Information about participating in the free webinar, scheduled for Wednesday, August 25, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, may be accessed by clicking here. Questions may also be sent by e-mail to [email protected].
Related Reading
Meaningful use: Comply and get paid ... but how? August 23, 2010
Final meaningful use rules: What radiologists need to know, July 29, 2010
CMS issues final 'meaningful use' EHR rules, July 13, 2010
ONC rules on EHR certification, June 18, 2010
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