CCHIT named compliance testing body for HIE, HIT

Under a new health information exchange (HIE) partnership, half of U.S. patients will now have their health information accessible to medical professionals regardless of location. The Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT) has entered into a public-private partnership of states, public agencies, federally-funded HIEs and health IT companies and been named the compliance testing body to help enhance the exchange and patient care.

The coalition of 15 states, 37 technology vendors and 34 HIEs, representing more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, has created a robust, highly automated testing program to verify that, once tested, a system is capable of exchanging health information with many other systems. With this testing, a single set of standardized, easy-to-implement connections can support communication among systems.

The effort is being jointly led by the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup, a New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC)–led consortium of states and vendors; and Healtheway, the newly formed public-private partnership of the eHealth Exchange, a network of 34 public and private organizations representing hundreds of hospitals, thousands of providers and millions of patients across the country.

This effort will build on and accelerate consensus on national standards, adopting EHR certification criteria and testing procedures as relevant and finalized for Stage 2 of meaningful use. Members of both groups will continue to provide feedback from these real-world implementations to the national health IT standard-setting initiatives established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

The coalition selected the CCHIT to carry out the testing. As the compliance testing body, CCHIT will certify that the interfaces between the HIT and HIEs are consistent across multiple states and systems. CCHIT is also an ONC authorized certification body and is an accredited testing laboratory for EHRs. CCHIT is collaborating with AEGIS.net on the testing software, the AEGIS Developers Integration Lab (DILSM), which is being developed under an open source license.

Over the course of 18 months, the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup developed technical and test specifications to address the major use cases of interoperable exchange. Meanwhile, plans took shape to transition the NwHIN Exchange to function outside the federal government as a public-private network, now called the eHealth Exchange. To expand nationwide HIE, Healtheway and the EHR/HIE Interoperability Workgroup formed a strategic partnership to enable technology systems, public and private providers and health information organizations (HIOs) to have access to more efficient testing.

The coalition established a set of functional, technical and test specifications that enable plug-and-play connectivity to simplify EHR and HIE development, including the ability to send and receive encrypted health information over the internet, lookup and retrieve patient records and produce a tightly constrained patient record summary which reduces variances and implementation-specific customization. These capabilities will allow providers to meet their goals for coordinating patient care.

Vendors have agreed to bring their products for testing according to these specifications and participating states have agreed to promote the value of EHR and HIE products certified in the program. This program will ensure that providers’ EHR software has the capability to connect to their local HIE and enable communities and states to share patient health information.

Coalition members will announce plans for launching the program and more details at the NYeC Digital Health Conference, Oct. 15-16, and webinars will be scheduled for the HIT and provider communities.