Why doesn’t a non certified EHR take the CCHIT criteria and do their own honest certification of their product? I’m not talking about going through and making sure that they meet the CCHIT criteria. Certainly, that’s basically what would be required for an EHR vendor to become certified. Instead I’m suggesting an EHR vendor be transparent about its strengths and weaknesses.

An EHR vendor could take each of the CCHIT criteria and evaluate how their EHR vendor measures up to the criteria. Then, they could publish to the public information on how they satisfy each criteria. This public information could include details about how they met the criteria and information about how they’ve striven to exceed the criteria.

Those criteria which the EHR vendor does not meet could be paired with an explanation of why the EHR vendor believes that the specific criteria doesn’t provide value to a doctor and therefore isn’t a priority for that EHR vendor. In fact, they might want to consider coupling this list with a list of features that aren’t part of the criteria that they’re currently working to develop.

If the EHR vendor wanted to take it one step further, they could have an outside person do the evaluation and provide a rating and feedback for each criteria. Then, the company could write commentary on why they disagree with the findings or why the company chose not to implement that requirement. This type of information would provide real value to someone selecting an EHR.

Of course, if your EHR software is not up to snuff, this will expose you. However, if your software is great, then you should have nothing to worry about no?

I will admit that this would be a major PR move similar to the CCHIT Certified EHR Replaced with Non-CCHIT EHR that I wrote about previously. However, imagine the story you can tell to those doctors who want a certified EHR. You can tell them why 100 (or whatever number) of the CCHIT criteria aren’t worth your effort and welcome people to go read why it’s not worthwhile. You just better make darn sure you can walk the walk. Might not work for everyone, but those who really care about having a usable EMR system will understand and those are the types of customers you want to have anyway.