Choosing EMR product/s to meet 100% of MU criteria from the ONC certified health product list

The office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has certified over 200 EHR products through the ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification bodies. The list is available at: http://onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert/EHRProductSearch. Products are certified as either “Complete EHR” or “Modular EHR” depending on whether they are capable of meeting all or some of the Meaningful Use Criteria. To qualify for the Meaningful Use Criteria, the health care practitioner must meet a minimum number of core set and menu set objectives specific to their category.

ONC has provided a comprehensive list of certified products with an option that enables the health care provider to choose more than one product in order to fulfill all the Meaningful Use requirements. While this may help those providers who are already using one or more modular products to identify additional complementary products to meet 100% of certification criteria, this may be undesirable or misleading in certain situations.

A practitioner can choose two or more products and include them in their cart and, if 100% of criteria are fulfilled, the website issues a CMS EHR Certification ID. However, these products may not necessarily be compatible with each other or suitable interfaces may not have been developed by the vendors for the products to work seamlessly. This can result in poor usability and is likely to lead to implementation failures.

In my opinion, the CHPL list can only be used as a rough guide to assist practitioners in choosing certified EHR technology and I think ONC should make that clear on the website.

Of course, by choosing a Certified complete EHR product such as ABELMed EHR-EMR/PM v11, there would be no need to select any other product and the practitioner can be confident that they are choosing a technology that will meet the requirements, rather than choosing a combination of certified modular products and not being sure about their compatibility.

Any comments?

V. J. Kulkarni, MD, MHSC

How useful are templates for encounter documentation in an Electronic Health Record?

Recently I came across an article which dissuades physicians from using templates for encounter documentation in Electronic Health Records. The article claims that templates are not beneficial to the physicians and are bad medicine for the patients and further goes on to state that templates are legally dangerous and templates allow third party payers an exclusive opportunity to manage the physician’s practice.

I think templates do have a place in Electronic Health Records software that allows for flexible template design. Using such software, properly created templates can save time for the physician. Checklists can be used to follow up patients such as chronic disease patients, thus ensuring that all salient follow up elements are considered.

Interested in knowing your views/comments. Thanks.


V. J. Kulkarni, MD, MHSC

Meaningful Use Criteria and ABELMed EHR-EMR / PM v11

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 offers incentives to eligible providers (EPs) who are participating in Medicare and Medicaid programs (and meet certain criteria that adopt and successfully demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology.

      
CCHIT (Certification Commission for Health Information Technology) was among the first organizations to be recognized by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as an Authorized Testing and Certification Body (ONC-ATCB) to certify such EHR technology.

ABELMed EHR-EMR/PM v11 (ABELMed), manufactured by ABEL Medical Software Inc., was one of the first EHR product tested and certified by CCHIT's ONC-ATCB program, which certifies that ABELMed is capable of meeting the 2011/2012 criteria supporting the Stage 1 meaningful use as approved by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). This certification is required to qualify eligible providers for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Making documentation and reporting of Meaningful Use Criteria easy, quick without duplicating documentation is the goal ABEL is striving to achieve. To that effect, we would like to invite comments and suggestions as how ABEL can achieve this goal. Thank you.

V. J. Kulkarni, MD, MHSC