The tools -- designed to be used in physicians' offices -- were certified by the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. The voluntary private-sector organization was created in 2004 by three industry associations to certify health IT products. The goals of the certification program are to reduce the risk of IT investment by physicians, ensure the interoperability of the products and protect the privacy of patient health information.
Tom Fricks, CIO at Harbin Clinic in Rome, Ga., said it was reassuring to see that the TouchWorks Electronic Health Record software from Allscripts LLC that the practice rolled out between 2002 and the end of 2005 was among the certified products. In 2002, when Harbin Clinic purchased the software, "it was hard to figure out who the players were going to be when the dust settled" in the EHR market, he said.
However, the most significant aspect of the announcement for his organization, Fricks said, was the commission's work to certify interoperability of the different software packages.
Although the clinic's 130 doctors represent about half of the town's physician population, Harbin is the only group in Rome that has an advanced EHR system in place, he said.
"It's reassuring ... that there is the potential for those groups to come up on an [EHR system] that will allow us to exchange information with them," Fricks said.
As of December 2005, Harbin had eliminated all nonelectronic documents from the practice; next month, the clinic forecasts that it will surpass 1 million electronic prescriptions written using the EHR system. Looking for Reassurance
Joe Paul, director of information systems at Morgan Haugh Medical Group, a multispecialty physician practice in Mayfield, Ky., said the first thing he did when he heard the certification announcement was to check to see if the Horizon Ambulatory Care Vision software from McKesson Corp. that his group uses had made the list.
"I found it comforting that they were on there," Paul said.
The certification will aid Morgan Haugh's plans to eventually be able to exchange medical information about its patients with other health care providers, he added.
HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said that the certification process means that "the possibility of doctors making a mistake in purchasing a system would be drastically reduced."
Among the vendors whose ambulatory EHR products received certification were market leaders Allscripts, Cerner Corp., eClinicalWorks LLC, Epic Systems Corp., GE Healthcare, McKesson and Misys Healthcare Systems. Mark Leavitt, chairman of the commission and no relation to the HHS secretary, said that the products were required to meet all of the 250 criteria for ensuring that the tools function as the vendors claim. Although he declined to say whether any products that had been submitted for testing had not met the standards, he said that more than 24 companies had applied for certification. So far, 20 have been certified, but some tests still are under way, Leavitt said.