When the ONC began naming its Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies (ONC-ATCBs) – starting with the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and the Drummond Group at the end of August, and then InfoGard Laboratories in September – EHR vendors knew immediately that time was of the essence.
Executives told Healthcare IT News at the time they were pleased with the news – and they all indicated that making the most of the moment was priority number one.
"We're delighted that ONC has named them, and done it on the schedule that they'd set," said Mark Segal, director, government and industry affairs at GE Health IT. "We're also pleased that ONC, from what we understand, shortly after naming them held training for both groups [to ensure] a high degree of consistency both across the groups and with the certification criteria."
Some executives would rather not have gone to those lengths, however. "We would prefer that there would be one certifying body, for consistency," said Wyche "Tee" Green, president and CEO of Greenway Medical Technologies, after the initial announcement. "But there are two and there are going to be more, so those are things we're going to have to be prepared for."
On the other hand, Mark Philips, vice president of product management at Sage was "a little surprised that initially only two vendors were named," noting then that "we're expecting quite a few large vendors that are going to be applying for certification, so we're hoping there's not going to be a big backlog that will take longer for all the vendors to get certified."
Segal agreed that moving with dispatch and clarity of purpose would be essential.
"What's critical – and we've conveyed this to CMS and ONC and NIST, and we're confident they understand it – is that for the certification process to move as quickly as they intend, it's important that outstanding questions that have been raised in the industry about the meaning of particular certification criteria or some of the NIST test methods and some issues of how certification will work in practice need to be resolved very, very quickly," he said.
"They really affect a lot about both how our customers are planning and how we plan our certification strategy. We and other vendors."
Segal seemed confident that the path to certification would be relatively free of hurdles. "Having been CCHIT certified [prior to it being named an ONC-ATCB] has put us in a good position from a product and roadmap standpoint," he said. "But nonetheless – and CCHIT has recently made this clear – we will need to fully certify anew against the final certification criteria and against the NIST test methods that have been designed to test against those criteria."
Rohit Nayak, vice president at MedPlus, the health IT subsidiary of Quest Diagnostics, agreed that past experience with CCHIT was "probably an advantage for people who have done this before because they understand the rigors of the process."
But he thought it was a good thing that prior certification didn't just translate to a rubber stamp, once the certifying body had the ONC imprimatur, since "a lot of the requirements that came out in the last year as a result of ONC and HHS direction were different from what existed at CCHIT before."
Moreover the fact that "vendors, large or small, will have to run through this certification process again is a good thing from a quality standpoint – the better to win the confidence of customers, he said. "From an industry standpoint, this whole process was put in place to build in some lowest common denominators, if you will."
That's "a harsh way of saying it," he confessed, but noted that it was imperative that not just "anybody who applies and goes through this process" gets certified. "We're watching that carefully," said Nayak. "Because if we don't get this right as an industry, we've lost whatever benefit we all collectively thought we'd achieve."
