Below is an excerpt from EMRandHipaa.com where John expresses concern over the HITECH act and its impact on the open source EMR movement. There will be a certification requirement and more and more and it looks as thought that will be the CCHIT certification. Some states have already independtly adopted CCHIT for their state healthcare facilities and it is just a matter of time before the government moves forward with this standardization.
My point is that I believe in open source can do and I think it could have a major impact in health care. In fact, I sincerely hope that it will have an impact. The problem is that if HHS decides to use CCHIT as the certification criteria for the EHR stimulus, then the HITECH act will basically be excluding open source EHR and EMR packages from being part of the “certified EHR.”
Sure, I guess a community of users behind an open source EHR could pool together enough money to pay for CCHIT certification, but realistically I don’t see this happening. In fact, the thought of paying so much money to CCHIT is almost counter to the open source movement. I just don’t see why any open source EHR would make CCHIT a priority in their development life cycle.
Source EMR & HIPPA
