Fully incorporating modern
information technology into the healthcare system promises many
benefits, including better quality care, less paperwork and fewer
medical errors while reducing unnecessary costs. In any such critical
application, however, it’s important to ensure that the new technology
behaves as expected. To meet this need in health information technology,
a broad array of public and private stakeholders have been working with
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST has
released the first of four installments of a new health IT test method
and related software.
Starting in 2011, the federal government will provide
extra Medicare and Medicaid payments to physicians’ offices that
implement health IT systems conforming to specific technical standards
and put to “meaningful use”, performing specifically defined functions.
Late last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
identified the required standards and provided a concrete definition of
“meaningful use.” To help physicians’ offices evaluate possible health
IT systems against these requirements, the HHS’s Office of the National
Coordinator (ONC) has established a national health IT certification
program.
As mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), NIST
and HHS/ONC are working to develop a suite of software tools to support
the health IT testing infrastructure. Input (by email to hit-tst-fdbk@nist.gov) on these
tools is welcomed from all stakeholders, including the general public,
health IT system vendors, standards organizations, certification bodies
and system implementers. The
tools are intended to help vendors test their health IT products and
ensure basic functionality, such as the calculation of body mass index
or proper formatting of common electronic health records in XML
(eXtensible Markup Language).
The health IT testing infrastructure does not create
any new standards, only the tools necessary to test for compliance with
existing standards that HHS announced late last year. Testing
laboratories will use these tools in the testing component of the
certification programs established by ONC. ONC has stated its intention
to use NIST’s National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program
(NVLAP) to perform the accreditation of testing laboratories.
A new Health IT Standards and Testing Web site has
been established (http://healthcare.nist.gov/)
to provide more information on the program and the testing
infrastructure suite.
Edited on Mar. 31, 2010, to clarify that the software suite is being
developed by NIST and HHS/ONC.
Media Contact: Ben Stein, bstein@nist.gov, (301) 975-3097
