Medical Device Daily

Tuesday's announcement that 18 companies are the first to receive certification for ambulatory electronic health records (EHRs) products by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT; Chicago), with two more pending, brought out Health and Human Services (HHS; Washington) Secretary Mike Leavitt to the event site at George Washington Medical Center (Washington).

Leavitt called the location the “center of the universe on health IT today.”

Following remarks by officials at the university and medical school, as well as Mark Leavitt, MD, PhD (no relation to the secretary), chair of CCHIT, the HHS secretary spoke to an enthusiastic audience, which included representatives of the vendors selected for certification.

“This is a big day,” Leavitt said. “To the extent that there's any symbolic value in having the Secretary of Health and Human Services at the biggest event in healthcare on a given day, I think I've accomplished that task.”

The effort to have formal certification of EHR vendors in the private sector was a notion prompted by President George Bush in his January 2004 State of the Union speech, when he called for the widespread use of health information technology (HIT) and for EHRs to be in use for most Americans by 2014.

Since 2004, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) and the American Health Information Community (AHIC) were established by the Department of Health and Human Services with the goal of improving healthcare through information technology.

In September 2005, HHS awarded CCHIT – which was founded in 2004 with support from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the National Alliance for Health Information Technology – a three-year contract to develop and evaluate certification criteria and create an inspection process for HIT in three areas: ambulatory EHRs for the office-based physician or provider; inpatient EHRs for hospitals and health systems; and the network architecture through which they interoperate and share information.

According to CCHIT, one of the “key actions” indicated by ONCHIT to reach this goal was to move the effort toward private sector certification of health information technology products. And the result – the certification of the first vendors and their products – was reported Tuesday, to be followed by a final quarterly report on July 31.

“I think we would all like to acknowledge that this is just a first step along a long path, but this is an important process and a profoundly important day,” Leavitt said.

While he both thanked and congratulated those companies that received certification, he emphasized that “this is not the end for you either. You're going to have to continue to go through the process of certification, but keep it up.”

Leavitt said that the U.S. is rapidly approaching the point where representatives of such organizations as HIMSS, as well as certain federal government leaders, no longer have to repeat the message that HIT is critical to an efficient healthcare system in the long-term.

“I think we're quickly getting to the point that we don't have to sell people on the idea that [HIT] is a good idea, that it reduces costs and that it will create future medical mistakes – and that it will increase quality,” the secretary said. “We don't have to talk much longer [about] how it's going to decrease the hassle for people in healthcare.”

He also stressed that such certification will be part of the essential criteria for doing business with the federal government in the long-term, with a focus on “interoperability,” acknowledging the people who have pored over “mind-numbing” details toward the goal of achieving standards of interoperability in such areas as wireless phones or automatic teller machines in banking, which allows for a person who has a card at one bank to use it most anywhere in the world. Such a system results from individuals who have worked to achieve interoperability standards, allowing several vendors' products to communicate across the system.

“This is important to the president,” the secretary said. “I just left a meeting where we were talking about transparency and the need for people to understand the price of what they pay, understand the quality they're receiving and to have to reason to care about it. And none of that can happen until we have interoperable systems. And that can't happen until we have the steps that we are taking here today continue to proceed.”

Mark Leavitt said that the vendor certification was the result of the “work of many, many volunteers who worked many, many hours.”

“All created this work together, so as a result, these individuals and organizations have created the first consensus-based standard electronic health records and a reliable process for inspecting electronic health records to ensure they comply with the standards,” Leavitt said.

Major physician professional organizations have also endorsed the CCHIT and its efforts, Leavitt said, including the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Last month, MDD reported on a packed hearing on HIT held June 21 in Washington by John Ensign (R-Nevada), who chairs the technology, innovation and competitiveness subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation (Medical Device Daily, June 26, 2006).

Ensign opened the hearing by saying that “we all know that the promise of healthcare information technology is very real,” but he also complained that “today, the standard-setting process is fragmented.”

The certified products and companies are:

  • HealthMatics EHR by Allscripts.
  • TouchWorks by Allscripts.
  • PowerChart by Cerner.
  • Companion EMR by Companion Technologies.
  • eClinicalWorks by eClinical Works.
  • Intergy by Emdeon Practice Services.
  • e-MDs Solutions Series by e-MDS.
  • EpicCare Ambulatory EMR by Epic Systems.
  • Centricity EMR by GE Healthcare
  • EncounterPRO by JMJ Technologies.
  • Horizon Ambulatory Care by McKesson.
  • mMD.Net EHR by MCS-Medical Communication Systems.
  • MedcomSoft Record by MedcomSoft.
  • WebChart by Medical Informatics Engineering.
  • Misys EMR by Misys Healthcare Systems.
  • NextGen EMR by NextGen Healthcare Information Systems.
  • myNightingale Physician Workstation by Nightingale Informatix.
  • Practice Partner Patient Records by Practice Partner.

Two other products – Medent by Community Computer Service and Medical Practice Management Client/ Server by LSS Data Systems – were conditionally certified pending customer verification of implementation.