Welcome to EMR and EHR

I’ve written a number of times about Drummond Group becoming an EHR certification organization in order to obtain the EMR stimulus money. Well, the Drummond Group has created a blog to keep you informed about theri partcipation in EHR testing/certification.

Here’s the most important part of their first post on their blog:

It appears Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) will be developing both the testing certification documents as well as the framework for authorizing certifying body for EHR certification.

Once that final piece of the puzzle is revealed, we can begin making more detailed plans for EHR certification. Until then, we believe attempting EHR certification is, at best, premature and, at worst, potentially a significant waste of time and money for ourselves, the certifying vendors and the adopting physicians and hospitals.

However, this waiting period does not mean we are idle. We will be making regular posts here on various EHR certification topics. Since many of you are not familiar with us, we will share a bit more about DGI and our qualifications to be an authorized HHS certifying body for EHR. We have a great deal of experience in system-to-system interoperability and are excited to bring that knowledge to the EHR community. Since we are getting so many emails from vendors interested in EHR certification, we will talk about some of the concerns we are hearing and thoughts on how to best address them.

This is exactly why you should want to be certified by Drummond Group and not CCHIT. I agree with them saying, “attempting EHR certification is, at best, premature and, at worst, potentially a significant waste of time and money for ourselves, the certifying vendors and the adopting physicians and hospitals.“

CCHIT’s Mark Leavitt has published his analysis of the $400,000 contract that NIST awared to Booz Allen Hamilton to develop a framework for electronic health record certification (see certified EHR).

Honestly, it seems that Mark’s as confused as everyone about this whole process. This is an interesting development since I would have thought that CCHIT would have had a close relationship with HHS, ONC, NIST, CMS, etc. The fact that CCHIT and Mark Leavitt are kind of left in the dark and full of lots of questions is not a good sign for CCHIT and fans of CCHIT. It is a good sign for those who don’t care for CCHIT.