The Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) approved the Chicago-based Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and the Drummond Group, Inc. (DGI) of Austin, TX, as the first official certifiers of EHR technology in late summer 2010. In late September, ONC also approved InfoGard Laboratories, Inc., in San Luis Obispo, CA. Now that ONC has named at least three authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCB), healthcare vendors can seek certification for their EHR systems and technologies, and providers can begin to look for certified products in the marketplace. Providers must use certified EHR technology to qualify for meaningful use incentive payments.
Qualifying for EHR meaningful use incentive dollars is no easy feat. A provider needs to be an eligible professional or hospital under the Medicare or Medicaid programs, with the latter also dependent on whether the provider’s state participates in the program. The EHR technologies the provider uses must be certified, and the provider must use those technologies appropriately for at least 90 days and attest to all of the above.
As I work with various clients who are preparing for transition to EHRs, I often hear HIM staff voice concerns that they haven’t been invited to the table for discussions regarding EHR strategy. In some cases, the selection of an entire system has been made for the facility with literally no input from the HIM department!
It comes up every other day now, it seems. It’s the question with no good answer; you’re sure of it. But your staff members really want to know: Why can’t they eat at their desks?
Where is the healthcare community at in terms of EHR implementation, and where is it going from here? And what effect, if any, has the EHR meaningful use incentive program had on implementation efforts? MRB asked these and other questions in our July 2010 benchmarking survey on EHRs—and HIM professionals from 325 hospitals and facilities answered.
