HIMSS' Electronic Health Record Association, a coalition of EHR and related vendors, have written a letter to National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo, MD, urging the ONC to reconsider the voluntary 2015 Edition criteria.
In February, the ONC announced the new and optional 2015 Edition criteria, designed to provide vendors flexibility in upgrading their systems while providing a hint at what the 2017 Edition will contain.
"The proposed 2015 Edition EHR certification criteria reflect ONC's commitment to incrementally improving interoperability and efficiently responding to stakeholder feedback," said Dr. DeSalvo in a statement. "We will continue to focus on setting policy and adopting standards that make it possible for healthcare providers to safely and securely exchange electronic health information and for patients to become an integral part of their care team."
However, the vendors in the EHRA do not see more frequent certification as the answer to crunched upgrade and certification timelines under the meaningful use program. Not only would few vendors be able to update their software for 2015 implementations, having the 2015 Edition criteria as a stepping stone to 2017 Edition criteria does not address the providers' call to have the final criteria 18 months before providers would expect 2017 Edition products on the market.
"Overall, we believe that the stated intention to move to more frequent certification… moves in the opposite direction from our request for adequate time to deliver high quality software, and for our customers to prepare to use it in a meaningful and safe way," according to the letter.
The letter-writers also took issue with some of the 2015 Edition requirements themselves, including more complex clinical decision support and allergy tracking capabilities, are counterproductive to reaching the ultimate goals of the meaningful use program. "It also runs counter to our strong belief that post-2014 certification should be highly focused on interoperability and build on stage 2 criteria rather than introducing new functional criteria," according to the letter.
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