Difference between revisions of "Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT)"

Revision as of 17:49, 4 September 2010

Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®) is a nonprofit foundation established in 2004. In 2006 CCHIT began to certify electronic health record technology.

The mission of the CCHIT® is to "accelerate the adoption of robust, interoperable health information technology by creating a credible, efficient certification process".

To help physicians, hospitals and other providers understand the Certification Commission’s criteria for electronic health records (EHRs), the CCHIT® makes available a Concise Guide to Certification, which provides a comparison to the Commission’s most recent criteria and demonstrates how certification of EHRs to these criteria ensures that they are a qualified electronic health record under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The CCHIT® criteria will be further adjusted to meet the final 2011 meaningful use objectives required by the US Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS) when the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC/HHS) publishes the criteria and standards needed to support those objectives.

The commission was established by America Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), The National Alliance for Health Information Health Technology, The Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in 2004 as a Limited Liability Corporation before becoming an independent self sustaining organization in 2007. The organization created the certification criteria through a consensus process of stakeholders from various clinical, technology, vendor, government and standards organizations.

As of now, the products certified by the commission fall under the following categories:

• Ambulatory EHR
• Behavioural Health EHR
• Emergency Department EHR
• Enterprise EHR
• ePrescribing Module
• Inpatient EHR
• Long Term and Post Acute Care EHR
• Stark and Anti-Kickback Exemption

CCHIT in collaboration with MITRE Corporation developed a new opensource EHR testing framework called LAIKA. The commission uses LAIKA to perform part of the interoperability certification inspection of EHRs. Laika uses the Ruby on Rails framework, the Java programming language, the open source MySQL database, and several Web 2.0 JavaScript libraries including Scriptaculous and Prototype.

On January 19, 2010, CCHIT announced significant updates and changes to their certification process in Response to ARRA and HITECH legislation. The organization press release is located at: http://www.cchit.org/media/news/2010/01/commission-updates-certification-programs-new-hhs-rules

On August 30,2010, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) authorized CCHIT as a Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB)to certify that electronic health records (EHRs) are capable of meeting the criteria to support meaningful use and qualify eligible providers and hospitals for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

References:

• 1. CCHIT website. Available at http://www.cchit.org/
• 2. ONC HHS. Available at http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt/community/healthit_hhs_gov__onc-authorized_testing_and_certification_bodies/3120