I was reading through a short article entitled “CCHIT TASK FORCE TO FOCUS ON STIMULUS PACKAGE REQUIREMENTS” which is actually a bit misplaced since the article really seems to talk about the CCHIT Task Force for Long Term and Post Acute Care, but I digress.

The thing that drew my attention was just reading through the process by which CCHIT puts together their criteria using task forces. I believe a number of people on my twitter feed are on or lead some of these CCHIT EHR task forces. I’d be interested to have a nice writeup from some of them on what it’s like to be on a CCHIT task force. How does it work? What’s the dynamic? If you’re willing to share, I’d love to hear more in the comments or drop me a note on my contact page.

I also was trying to think of other cases where a task force like approach worked for certifying software. I couldn’t really think of any. However, I couldn’t think of that many software certifications either. What I have seen work to a certain extent is large IT vendors that come together in some sort of organization to establish a standard for communicating. This is something that I wish would happen with a number of EHR vendors. It’s not something that will really help an EHR vendors bottom line, but it’s the right thing to do and that has its own benefits.