CCHIT Demise Should Herald Demise Of EHR Certification

In my very first post for Forbes.com, written back in May, I argued that certification of electronic health records had run its course and was no longer needed in health IT.  This week, that position got a boost with some news that in one sense was shocking and in another was not surprising at all: the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) is closing its doors on Nov. 14.

“Though CCHIT attained self-sustainability as a private independent certification body and continued to thrive as an authorized ONC testing and certification body, the slowing of the pace of ONC 2014 Edition certification and the unreliable timing of future federal health IT program requirements made program and business planning for new services uncertain. CCHIT’s trustees decided that, in the current environment, operations should be carefully brought to a close,” CCHIT Executive Director Alisa Ray said in a press release issued Tuesday.

The commission, which created health IT certification in 2004, announced in January that it was exiting the certification business, ostensibly to “return it to its founding public mission of supporting the adoption of robust, interoperable health information technology.” After passage of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, the federal government began regulating EHR certification...