May 29, 2009
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Concise Guide to CCHIT Certification Criteria
The CCHIT Certification Criteria represent a substantial body of work, developed by hundreds of
volunteers through an open, multi-stakeholder, consensus-based process, and refined by testing and
operational certification over the past 3 years. With the passage of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA), certification has attracted national interest from a broader audience. This
Guide is intended to provide a clear, readable digest of the criteria, as well as to illustrate how certification
of EHRs to these criteria ensures that they are a qualified electronic health record under ARRA.
The ARRA definition is:
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(13) QUALIFIED ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD.—The term ‘qualified electronic health
record’ means an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that—
(A) includes patient demographic and clinical health information, such as medical history and
problem lists;
and (B) has the capacity—
(i) to provide clinical decision support;
(ii) to support physician order entry;
(iii) to capture and query information relevant to health care quality; and
(iv) to exchange electronic health information with, and integrate such information from other
sources.
This guide explicitly assigns Certification Criteria to each of those qualifications. Note that many criteria
support more than one of the qualifications. Furthermore, the ARRA qualifications are not an exhaustive
list of required capabilities; for example, they do not mention technical security features essential to
protection of health information privacy. Accordingly, we include additional supporting categories to
accommodate these other essential functions of an EHR.
CCHIT has certification programs fully operational for Ambulatory EHRs, Inpatient EHRs, Emergency
Department EHRs, and Health Information Exchanges, as well as optional add-on certifications for Child
Health, Cardiovascular Medicine, and Enterprise EHRs, with stand-al