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CCHIT finding purpose beyond government

The new CCHIT certification can assure that Electronic Health Record (EHR) software can deliver the finely-grained levels of permission HIPAA was meant to provide and which modern medicine needs.
Written by Dana Blankenhorn, Inactive

Soon after taking on this beat I became somewhat notorious as a critic of the Certification Commission for Health IT (CCHIT). I saw it as being a vendor-led group aiming to be a gatekeeper and keeping new entrants out of the market.

With CCHIT now officially shut-out of that role by the final meaningful use rules, it would be easy for it to pull up its tent and go home.

But it hasn't, and the group deserves applause for that.

The group continues to churn out "certification" products, and its latest is quite interesting. It's about behavioral health.

The most important issue here is consent management, and that turns out to be a very big deal, especially in mental health.

As patients we've all gotten HIPAA forms to sign. They say the doctor won't give our our personal data without our consent. And each time he or she wants to send records along (this is an especially big issue in psychiatry) we have to sign another form.

The intent of the law was to make this more nuanced. The idea was that these consents could be managed and audited, not just to protect from lawsuits but to give patients more control over their records.

Government officials disagree over where the border should be, insurers are confused, and the aim of meaningful exchange of information (as opposed to just meaningful use) is being lost.

The new CCHIT certification can help in that debate, by assuring that Electronic Health Record (EHR) software can easily deliver the finely-grained levels of permission HIPAA was meant to provide (but didn't) and which modern medicine really needs.

Despite widespread, sometimes even deliberate, confusion, the issue should be pretty simple.

I don't want someone I don't know knowing my specific medical test results. I don't mind having my personal data aggregated, so no one knows its mine, especially since modern databases fully anonymize it. And I'd like to now where my records have gone.

For too long HIPAA has been used as an excuse by doctors and hospitals to do nothing. Behavioral health certification may break this logjam.

So congratulations to CCHIT.

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