Allscripts Isn’t CCHIT Certified 2011

Sometimes it’s the little things you catch at an enormous conference at HIMSS that are the most powerful. One of those came for me when I was talking to the VP of marketing from one of the EHR vendors on the floor. This was one of the most interesting people I met with at HIMSS.

As we were talking he kind of said off hand that one of the visitors to his booth had said Allscripts isn’t CCHIT certified.

Now I should clarify. Allscripts was CCHIT certified back in 2007. However, they didn’t do CCHIT certification and in 2008 but they still haven’t done any of the 2011 full CCHIT certification or Preliminary ARRA certification either.

As a side note, CCHIT has moved or taken down the previous years certification lists from their website (not sure why or where they moved them) (UPDATE: You have to drill down to the categories and you can find the previous years). However, they are listed on the EMR and EHR wiki.

The interesting point here is that Allscripts, an EHR company with possibly 21% EHR market share, hasn’t bothered with the CCHIT certification.

I have no doubt that Allscripts will be HHS certified (or whatever they end up calling the certification). However, they haven’t seen the need to go after the CCHIT certification. No doubt there sitting there waiting to get a cheaper EHR certification. This is true for a few hundred other EMR vendors as well.

Another interesting sign of the move away from CCHIT certification and on to the HHS certification.

And yes Allscripts, I am still mad at you for shutting me out of your party at HIMSS despite having registered and read the dozen or so emails you sent reminding me that I registered, but never telling me that I had to stop by your booth for a wristband.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

14 Comments

  • John,
    It feels a little odd defending a competitor, but I do believe in being truthful. I think there may be a few inaccurate statements above, or at least some clarification of technicalities.

    First, CCHIT still lists past-year certifications. Those as well as “preliminary 2011” (see last point) certifications are at http://www.cchit.org/products.

    Secondly, CCHIT has a few flavors of certification (Ambulatory, Inpatient, and Emergency). I see AllscriptsMisys listed for both 2007 and 2008 under Ambulatory, but not for Inpatient or Emergency.

    Lastly, yes, AllScripts isn’t certified for 2011, but as of right now, technically no EHR system can claim to be certified for ARRA 2011. With this week’s publications (and promise of more) by NIST, the process of defining certification criteria isn’t finished.

    Keep up the good work on this website. As a professional for an EMR vendor (that will meet the ARRA 2011 criteria when it’s possible to officially certify :-), I find your website informative and timely.

  • Swithin,
    Thanks for the clarifications. I’ve updated the post.

    I’d been to the link you provided to the CCHIT website and I only saw direct links for 2011 full and preliminary. I see now that you have to click into the various certification areas and you can see the previous years and yes I did have an old list which didn’t list Allscripts as certified in 2008. I’ve updated that as well.

    Yes, no one can be ARRA 2011 certified, but it’s an interesting message that Allscripts has chosen not to follow the CCHIT path to it. Instead, it seems they’re waiting it out to see what NIST and ONC end up deciding for “certified EHR.” That’s an important message for doctors I think.

    Thanks for clarifying things. Always nice when readers keep you honest.

  • John,
    It’s not just Allscripts.
    The last certification year before the new 2011 ARRA thing, was 2008. All the large ambulatory vendors have the 2008 certification. The 2011 certification opened rather late (CCHIT scrapped the 2009 at the last moment) and only NextGen and Greenway managed to get in the queue so far.
    e-CW, athena, e-MDs and all the other “big guys” are either in the queue, or waiting for the dust to settle. It won’t be long now, and there is plenty of time until 2011.

  • John-Great website. As a physician looking at emr systems for my solo dermatology practice I have always been told to only consider those with CCHIT certification. I found a system that I think will work well for my practice but it is not CCHIT certified. The vendor assures me that the system meets “meaningful use” and something called HiTech. At this point in time would I be a fool to consider a non-cchit system? I thank you in advance for your expertise and reply.

  • Jerome,
    I’d actually say that you’d be a fool to only consider CCHIT systems.

    The only thing that concerns me about the vendor you mention is that they say that they “meet meaningful use and HITECH.” That’s impossible to say since Meaningful Use and the “certified EHR” part of HITECH are still not finalized. So no EMR vendor can truthfully say they meet it. They can say that they WILL meet it once it’s finalized. They can also say that given the details that have been released so far they don’t see any problem users of their EMR will have with meaningful use and the HITECH act.

    Just realize one thing. You are the one that will have to show meaningful use. Certainly, an EMR vendor can make showing meaningful use easier for you, but at the end of the day you are the one that’s going to have to make sure that you are documenting and using the EMR in a way that will meet the meaningful use guidelines.

    Lots more I could say, but this should get you going in the right direction. It’s amazing how poorly the information about the EMR stimulus money has been spread. Although, I’m preaching to the choir it seems since you asked questions that many won’t. I am also hoping to publish another e-Book on the EMR stimulus money to go along with my recently released EMR selection e-Book: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/emr-selection-book/

  • The actual verbage is:
    ____________ is HITECH Stimulus Ready per the standards released on 12/31/2009. HITECH is the new Certification Standard for EMR systems.
    ____________ expects to meet certification requirements for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and HITECH. FINAL Certification requirements for HITECH were released on December 31, 2009. _________ is fully CCR compliant (exchange data with hospitals, EMR systems and info repositories), e-prescribing, electronic claim submission and clinical data submission. ____________ meets these requirements.
    Call to see if you qualify 800-436-3150 x86
    Rev: 1/1/2010

  • Jerome,
    That’s funny, because that EMR system is actually a pretty regular reader of this site. Not sure if I stole the “EMR stimulus ready” from them or whether they read the idea here. Can’t remember where I got that, but I did a post about it. Interesting to see it in practice.

    That’s an accurate statement. I expect that once the final rule and certification comes out, that EMR will go and be stimulus ready. You should just make sure to have items in your contract that include the requirement that they be a certified EHR and have the features required for meaningful use.

    Of course, even if you do this in the contract, remember that there’s going to be work on your side to actually get the money. It’s not as simple as just implementing it and then getting the money. It’s implementing all of the “meaningful use” guidelines. For example, an EMR vendor can’t guarantee that you’re going to record the ethnicity of your patient. That’s up to you and your staff to do it. They can provide you a field to store the info though.

  • Thanks. They are willing to do what you suggest in the contract and seem pretty reasonable to me. I plan on purchasing your ebook after this post. As a solo physician, spending upwards of $80,000 for emr software with ongoing maintenance of 18% of the purchase price would be a bitter pill to swallow to only consider vendors with CCHIT certification. I visited the “members only” section of my national derm organization and on their site they make a big deal about choosing and emr that is CCHIT cert. At this point my only concern is if I make this purchase and then a year or two down the road my local insurance IPA require that I use the emr software that all the other docs choose for the ipa.

  • Jerome,
    Send your national derm organization my way and I’ll be happy to help enlighten them on the other side of the equation;-)

    The IPA stuff is a hard problem. Although, CCHIT cert won’t help with that. You will want to focus on the contract section of my e-Book since it will give you some good direction on things you should get in your EHR contract that will help you better deal with moving to an IPA’s EMR software if heaven forbid it came to that.

    I’m very interested to hear your feedback on my EMR selection ebook. Please let me know if something isn’t clear or if you wish something else was covered in it.

  • Allscripts Professional EHR 9.1 is CCHIT certified for 2011. Announcement just came out last week.

  • Thanks HeidiAH for the information. Of course, now the question is whether physicians will be confused since Allscripts Professional EHR 9.1 is certified (although still not ARRA Certified for the EMR stimulus since that hasn’t been finalized yet) but what about all of Allscripts other ambulatory EMR products: Mysis, Allscripts touchworks, Eclipsys sunrise amb, Eclipsys peak (bond clinician), and Medinotes? I think that’s all of Allscripts EMR software since the acquisition of Eclipsys.

  • Allscripts Enterprise V11 is not CCHIT certified 2011 because it would not pass the certification not because of a strategy . . . they have an upgrade at the end of the year that is supposed to satisfy the requirements for meaningful use (and CCHIT 2011). V11 still is a poor product with horrible KLAS scores that are still trending down meanwhile the Allscripts marketing machine keeps rolling. The product might work well for a <25 MD specialty practice but for a true enterprise it is trouble. Eclipsys acquisition should help them sell Enterprise to the unsuspecting acquired footprint.

  • I would just like you to know that Allscripts is at this point in time fully certified with ONC for 2011

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories