For all the criticism and wiseacres about CCHIT, I have yet to see ANYONE provide a REASONABLE ALTERNATAVE to CCHIT as a means of ensuring some degree of UNIFORMITY of standards
I'm really not able to keep up with all of you about the technicalities of the CCHIT debate, but gkfahnbulleh's comment (above) left me thinking. How could anyone else provide an alternative to CCHIT? Our government has made it the sole arbiter of what is acceptable "interoperability". Why would anyone go out on a limb to try to provide another set of standards? It's as if a group of hospitals decided to decline JCAHO audits and go with a 3rd party. Instant decertification by all government insurances, probably economic failure would follow, or at least a Congressional hearing!
My concern about CCHIT is that it is a single standards organization, not made up by all interested EMR developers. As such, I think it is or will eventually stifle innovation. Other technical standards organizations (I'm thinking of
IEEE) has open membership for the individuals & industry organizations it serves, and pushes multiple emerging technologies. Remember how some of us used "draft-N" wireless routers, and most stuck with "g"? What if IEEE told us we could only access the internet with one standard? Who would have ever made or bought a new standard? I think that the technology world is full of such examples, that a cutting edge development, good or bad (think viruses and Trojans), changes the established structure of all the rest. CCHIT is
just plain composed in the wrong way to make this happen.
