Rethinking Certification

As stakeholders in payer, provider, and government communities debate the optimal timing of ICD10, Meaningful Use Stage 2, ACA, and HIPAA Omnibus rule deadlines, it's becoming increasingly clear that many hospitals which attested in 2011 and 2012 will not have their 2014 edition certified software installed, training completed, and workflow re-engineered in time for the Stage 2 attestation deadlines. Now that we have experience with two stages of Meaningful Use, it's also clear that a three year cycle is needed to ensure safe, high value, well adopted, introduction of new IT functionality. Part of the problem, as I've discussed previously, is that the certification criteria are overly burdensome and in many circumstances disconnected from the attestation criteria, requiring very prescriptive features that go beyond the intent of Policy Committee and Standards Committee.How did this happen?  When Meaningful Use Stage 2 regulations were being written, ONC entered a "quiet period" in which smart people wrote regulatory language and certification scripts isolated from the rest of the world to ensure there was no bias introduced.   This was a "waterfall methodology" in which elaborate specifications and a long planning process was followed by an isolated development process resulting in a single huge deliverable with little opportunity to validate the result, pilot the components, or revise/improve the product after the fact.  The flaws in the Stage 2 certification ...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs