I’m really excited about a meaningful use and EHR conference that’s being held literally in my backyard. It’s the Inaugural Digital Medical Office of the Future: Driving Toward Meaningful Use Conference and Exhibition. The conference is scheduled for September 9-10, 2010 at Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas, NV. You can see more details at the EHR conference website.

The whole conference seems really well done and should have a great mix of EHR, EMR, Meaningful Use and HIE topics. I’m personally most excited to hear the famous Mark Anderson from the AC Group speak in person. Our paths have crossed a number of times in the digital world, and so I’m excited to meet him in the physical world. I also noticed that David Kibbe is on the agenda. Both are legends in the EMR and EHR world which should make for an extraordinary time.

If any EMR and HIPAA readers plan to attend, it would be fun to meet you in person. Maybe we could do an EMR and HIPAA dinner or something. It’s always fun to meet readers of the site in person.

Full Disclosure: I’ve been given press access to the conference and exchanged the ad you see in the right sidebar for EMR and HIPAA listed in the conference materials.

FierceEMR has really hit the healthcare IT arena in force over the past 6 months. They even have a big party planned for HIMSS. I’ll probably be stopping by since it’s the day after the New Media Meetup at HIMSS. Well, one of my favorite healthcare IT writers, Neil Versel wrote an article for FierceEMR that really caught my eye. It was titled, “Kibbe: New ONC standards make CCHIT process ‘irrelevant’”

If you’ve read this blog for any time you know that I’m an enormous fan of CCHIT (that was in the sarcasm font in case you couldn’t tell). I even declared the Marginalization of CCHIT back in July of last year. So, obviously I agree with David Kibbe’s assertion that the CCHIT process is irrelevant thanks to the HITECH act. A section of the article linked above describes some of the major problems with CCHIT:

Kibbe long has said the CCHIT certification process discourages innovation by being too complicated and costly for new, small companies that otherwise might shake up the EHR market with lower-priced, easier-to-use products. He also has held that the certification body was too closely tied to the health IT establishment. “CCHIT in effect acted as judge and jury for its own industry’s definition of EHR software, inhibiting alternative approaches that would embrace component or modular architectures, web-based delivery also known as ‘software-as-a-service,’ and practical means of achieving interoperable data exchange between applications from different vendors,” he says in a recent blog post.

No doubt the CCHIT criteria is no longer meaningful. The only problem is that a question still haunts my mind, “Did we just move the flawed process from CCHIT to ONC?”

In response to my previous post about CCR and CCD, I’ve learned a whole bunch about the two different standards for healthcare data exchange. Although, I must admit that it’s all a bit messy right now.

Since I know that many of you don’t read all the comments on the site, nor do you get to read the emails I receive, I think you’ll find some of the following links about CCR and CCD quite interesting.

First is a description of the difference between CCR and CCD. This is written by David Kibbe who helped create the CCR specifications. So, keep that in perspective, but it’s a really interesting write up comparing the two standards.

Dr. Jeff also put together this interesting “summary” of CCR and CCD. It’s a little scattered, but has some good nuggets in it that expanded my knowledge of the various standards.

The other good thing that came out of my previous post is an interview with Dr. David Kibbe which I’ll be posting next week. He ducks some of the politically charged questions, but I think you’ll really enjoy the interview. If you don’t, I’m sure you’ll be willing to let me know that too.