I welcome the news of the Drummond Group’s application to become a certifying entity for healthcare IT products as an important, positive development for EHR vendors of all shapes and sizes, and for ONC (the Office of the National Coordinator) as well.

Recall hat ast ummer, ONC suggested that it preferred to outsource the process by which HHS/ONC certifies EHRs as being suitable for providers who wish to qualify for meaningful use payouts under Medicare (as stipulated by the HITECH provisions within ARRA), and it also indicated that it preferred to have multiple certifying agencies rather than one.

 But before the announcement by Drummond, CCHIT had been the only game in town, and had (my opinion) been doing a disservice and generally scaring a lot of folks by offering “partial certifications” and encouraging providers to sign up for their process before it was necessary and indeed, before meaningful use criteria had been finalized by ONC.

 Perhaps rummond’s announcement will encourage other entities to take the plunge as well, not to mention motivate ONC to release criteria it will use to select the outsourced providers of certifying services.

 More importantly CCHIT has built a track record as using “structural-” and “process-oriented” criteria rather than “outcomes” criteria, the latter being what ONC is clearly after.

Structural/process criteria are things like “Does the EHR have this button, or that functionality?” This is in sharp contrast to results-oriented criteria like “Does the system perform e-prescribing successfully?” or “Can the system produce performance reports against PQRI quality metrics?”

 It is not a trivial matter for an agency that is used to doing things one way – using one set of criteria and a particular philosophy underlying those criteria – to change its ways, adopt a foreign set of criteria and do a good job with it.

 By contrast, Drummond Group (according to its Web site) is all about outcomes and results, so their approach is more in line philosophically with what ONC has in mind. Plus they’ve done a lot of work with interoperability and Web-based certifications, which is not CCHIT’s strong suit.

 In addition, Drummond has prior experience working with the federal government (as has CCHIT). I believe it has worked with both the CDC and NIST before, so ONC can get good references on Drummond.

 Other organizations that might be able to do this are MGMA, NCQA, JCAHO. But I’d have to look into this more – the latter two are already in the site-visit/certification business, but I’m not sure about their track record with tech (Drummond’s is very strong here).