Certification

Additional payment is given to practices if they are able to submit the clinical quality measure data electronically via a tab delimited file that takes its data from an EHR that is certified under the original standards established by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) or another EHR certification body recognized by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) in the Department of Health and Human Services. Certification by one of these certification bodies will signify that an EHR technology has the capabilities necessary to support the efforts to meet the goals and objectives of meaningful use. Click the link for the list of ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies . The Importer utility will import the data regardless of the certification status of the software that created the data for the tab-delimited file. It will also keep track of the elements that were imported as well as the certification status during import. The elements are tagged with both a tag indicating their "import status" and their "certification status". MCMP-PAT uses these tags to keep track of whether the value has been manually abstracted or imported; and if it is imported whether the data came from a certified EHR. Effect of Activities For the import status, the fields are initially tagged as "not imported" and when their values are overwritten during import, they are tagged as "imported". For the certification status, the fields are initially tagged as "not certified". This is updated when their values are overwritten during import. If the value of an imported field is updated during manual abstraction, the field keeps its import and certification status. The table below summarizes the effect of the different activities to the status of fields. Activity Result Initial settings Import status = "not imported" Certification status = "not certified" Import using not certified software Set import status to "imported" Keep current certification status Import using certified software Set import status to "imported" Set certification status to "certified" Manual Abstraction Keep import status Keep certification status The table below shows some sample scenarios of how the field status is updated. Field Value to Import Stored Value Current Cert. Status MCMP-PAT Action Resulting Import Status Resulting Cert. Status HbA1cDate 11/11/2006 09/09/2006 certified overwrite stored value set status to imported set status to certified HbA1cDate null/blank/invalid 09/09/2006 any keep stored value because value to be imported is invalid keep import status keep certification status HbA1cDate 05/01/2006 09/09/2006 any keep stored value because value to be imported is earlier date * keep import status keep certification status HbA1cDate 09/09/2006 09/09/2006 certified overwrite stored value ** set status to imported set status to certified HbA1cDate 09/09/2006 09/09/2006 not certified overwrite stored value ** set status to imported keep certification status *   This assumes that the user specified not to overwrite more recent dates. ** If the value to be imported is similar to the stored value, it is considered that the field value is imported. Related Links CCHIT Website  List of CCHIT-Certified EHR  (Note: the list may not include EHR with expired certification) List of ONC-ATCB Certified EHR  ONC-Authorized Testing and Certification Bodies