How easy is it for professional user to actually use the "certified" systems.
Probably not a real challenge for the techies in medicine - and there are a lot. But there are a lot of professionals that are not computer hot shots. My doctor is one - old enough to have a lot of experience, smart enough to know how to properly use that experience and a two finger typist. Lots of wasted time typing with two fingers.
My wife is a therapist, trained in an old fashion system, based on the British System. Very demanding, but it graduated very good therapists. She is slowly becoming computer literate, but when the hospital she worked in on a part time basis went to computer based systems her productivity fell - simply because of two finger typing.
And a friend of ours is a nurse who uses hand me down computers for email only. I solved her Y2K problem on her DOS box by changing the date back 10 years. But she's a good nurse, who will take time away from patients to do the two finger tasks.
While it is safe to bet that the young folks in medicine will have better computer skills than the most experienced there is a screaming need to ensure that the systems are designed to a quality standard for users.
It's like when I was designing retail systems in the early 80s - one of my primary responsibilities was to ensure that the least computer literate in an area could easily and effectively use my designs. That is where half the sweat went to.
The first press release bragging software is “CCHIT Certified” hit my desk this weekend.
It’s from NextGen, and relates to a sales contract with the Mount Kisco Medical Group. The group, which has 230 physicians in a variety of specialties, decided to automate with NextGen software.
Good for NextGen, but the headline here is the certification. CCHIT was recently approved as a certification authority by the Department of Health and Human Services, but it has been conducting certification tests right along, first under a non-specific “Preliminary ARRA” designation and now under a registered mark of its own.
Before 2009, CCHIT had been angling to become the sole authority for certifying that health IT worked. This was based on its own criteria, and it had support for this from the Bush Administration HHS, although the government put no money behind the effort.
Passage of the HITECH Act, part of the stimulus, led to a year-long struggle over defining certification standards, resulting in the definition called “meaningful use.” Through most of this process, CCHIT was on the sidelines, alongside critics who argued that its birth as an industry-sponsored group meant it could not be unbiased.
Now the battle is over. The standards have been promulgated. CCHIT has even been approved as a certification authority, alongside the Drummond Group of Austin, TX.
It’s now a marketing battle between Drummond, CCHIT, and whatever other group or groups might be approved, to see who can get the business of vendors.
In that battle, the NextGen release is an important artifact. It matters to this vendor in their marketing. Presumably it wants this to matter to customers and prospects as well.
But does it?
Fact is, meaningful use criteria and certification are different subjects. Or they were until HHS finalized the former and signed on groups like CCHIT as certificate authorities.
Certification, under the original CCHIT scheme, meant software performed certain functions. It was about speeds and feeds. It you filled in all the check boxes, you were certified. This was convenient for vendors.
Fulfilling meaningful use requirements is about getting results from the software, not just installing it. It means doing certain things that show value, that can induce organizational change. The onus is not on the software, but on the installation. Ultimately it’s on the customer.
Just installing a CCHIT Certified software package doesn’t mean you’ve fulfilled meaningful use, in other words. You actually have to use it, meaningfully.
So how much does the logo CCHIT Certified matter? ?How much should it matter?
