Physician practices considering the purchase of an electronic health record (EHR)-and perhaps holding off in the interest of standards compliance-have a lot of important news crossing their radar screens lately. In mid-July, HHS secretary Mike Leavitt, together with Mark Leavitt, M.D., chair of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), announced the first 18 vendors to earn certification for their EHR products, based on their having met more than 250 standards for interoperability, functionality and security.

Subsequently, CCHIT issued a public statement describing criteria that might become additional and future requirements for EHR certification such as: 1) warning the clinician if a prescribed drug cannot be checked for formulary adherence, drug-drug or drug-allergy reactions; 2) requiring EHRs to associate order, medications and notes with one or more problems; 3) e-prescribing capability; 4) providing a searchable list of medications. Certification of EHRs for use in ambulatory settings is the first giant step in a nationwide effort to bring standards compliance to clinical documentation software; this step will be followed by certification for inpatient electronic patient records and, finally, certification related to platforms.

The newly certified vendors and their products include: Allscripts, HealthMatics EHR; Allscripts, TouchWorks; Cerner, PowerChart; Companion Technologies, Companion EMR; eClinicalWorks LLC, eClinicalWorks; Emdeon Practice Services, Intergy; e-MDs, e-MDs Solution Series; Epic Systems Corp, EpicCare Ambulatory EMR; GE Healthcare, Centricity EMR; JMJ Technologies, EncounterPRO; McKesson, Horizon Ambulatory Care; Medical Communication Systems, mMD.Net EHR; MedcomSoft, MedcomSoft Record; Medical Informatics Engineering, WebChart; Misys Healthcare Systems, Misys EMR; NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, NextGen EMR; Nightingale Informatix Corp, myNightingale Physician Workstation; Practice Partner, Practice Partner Patient Records. Certification is renewable every year, although vendors may market their products with the current year's certification for up to three years.

At the end of July, CCHIT announced that two products which had received conditional certification are now fully certified: MEDENT 16 from Community Computer Service and the EHR component of Medical and Practice Management Suite, Client Server V 5.5 from LSS Data Systems. The organization also certified iMedica Patient Relationship Manager 2005, V5.1 from iMedica Corp., and Praxis Electronic Medical Records V. 3.4 by INFOR-MED Corp. CCHIT expects to announce yet more certified EHRs by late October.