CCHIT, MITRE Collaborate on Open Source Health IT Testing Resource

September 11, 2007 - The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) and the MITRE Corp. recently announced a collaborative relationship to begin building a testing resource to evaluate compliance of electronic health records (EHRs) and networks with certification criteria for interoperability.
This new initiative will make it easier for health information technology companies to add standards-based information exchange capabilities to their products and prepare those products for certification. The testing software will be developed under an open source license so that it is free and publically available, and the Certification Commission will use the software running on a secure platform during its inspection of a product's compliance.
The first focus of the project is expected to be a tool to verify standards compliance of a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) sent or received by EHRs. "The ASTM/HL7 CCD is a core element in several of the AHIC Use Cases, and is becoming the standard for exchanging patient summary information," said Leavitt. The Certification Commission and MITRE have agreed upon a project schedule that will have the CCD verification tool ready in time for CCHIT's 2008 pilot testing and certification launch.
The Certification Commission and MITRE - both independent, nonprofit organizations - have a similar vision for the development of robust, interoperable health IT and a common mission in supporting the government, private enterprise and the public in attaining that goal. To achieve that, the initiative is designed as an open source project. With MITRE's guidance and oversight, any individual or organization is free to propose contributions to the project's engineering technology. The resulting work will be freely and publicly available. Health IT companies of all sizes will be able to take advantage of this shared resource as they are developing new products.
For more information: www.cchit.org