I previously posted about how the selection of CCHIT as the certification criteria for the HITECH act excludes open source EHR. I took more of a practical look at why an open source EHR product wouldn’t ever pay for CCHIT certification. I recently found a different angle about why CCHIT is not good for those interested in open source EHR.

Understand that CCHIT currently provides NO benefit to open source, in fact the CCHIT certified edition cannot be the one provided as open source, that is how the certification works. We have to have a commercial relationship with the customer in order to provide the certified edition. You can get the same feature set (that is already the case) but can’t call yourself CCHIT and would probably no be eligible for most funding/reumbursement if using the open source edition. So if you are interested in using our commercial edition of ClearHealth no problem but if you want a CCHIT certified open source system, none will exist until they adjust their process. Read the fine print on WorldVista, same deal.

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