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Posted in EMR, Healthcare Integration

A recent Physicians Practice article entitled Technology: Should Your EMR Be Certified? provides an interesting give-and-take on the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) CCHIT certification process.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology - CCHIT - is a private organization that offers a voluntary certification process for EMR vendors. To achieve certification, the vendors must complete tasks in 40 categories (the article highlights all 40 categories). The features and functionality tested are general in nature, but the plan is to introduce certification for specialty areas, including emergency medicine, cardiovascular, etc.

With over 200 EMR vendors, finding the right solution for a physician practice was challenging, so the certification process provides a quality check on core functionality and, in the process, has jump-started market adoption. On the possible downside, adding feature after feature may be overload for some practices, and the certification process does not test ease of use of these features. As a result, an EMR may have more features than needed, and it may be very inefficient to use (e.g., too many clicks to enter or retrieve patient information).

Another gap is interoperability or healthcare integration. Although the objective is to introduce more healthcare integration criteria to the CCHIT certification process, buyers will need to determine the ease of interfacing with other systems such as billing, laboratory systems, radiology systems, etc.

Certification, consequently, is not the final stop in selecting an EMR that may be right for your practice. Key actions still need to be taken in evaluating an EMR application. Suggested additional evaluation steps are:

• Work with the application to determine ease of use - get “hands-on” with the EMR
• Talk with existing users to determine experiences - good and not so good - with the product and customer support
• Create healthcare integration scenarios to ensure that the EMR can easily interface with other healthcare vendor or provider applications

As one of the IT consultants in the article states, “Create a scripted patient exam for the vendor to follow when they demo the product. Otherwise, it becomes just a show of bells and whistles instead of showing you how it would work in your practice.”

Last 5 posts by Jon Mertz

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