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