athenaClinicalsSM Receives CCHIT Certification
We’re happy to announce that The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) has certified the software component of athenahealth’s service-based EMR, athenaClinicals. CCHIT also declared that athenaClinicals meets CCHIT ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) criteria.
Ambulatory EHRs are designed for physician offices and clinics where most Americans get their healthcare. CCHIT is a Recognized Certification Body in the United States for certifying health information technology products – an independent, nonprofit organization that sets the benchmark for EHRs.
What is athenaClinicals?
The core idea behind athenaClinicals is that it takes more than just software to deliver the kinds of consistent financial and operational improvements that practices are looking to get through adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs). So athenahealth developed the world’s first “clinical cycle management service” – combining web-based clinical software, knowledge, and work to deliver far more dependable returns-on-investment to practices than traditional EMRs have been able to do.
Now, athenahealth provides the only physician revenue and clinical cycle management offering that integrates web-based practice management and EMR software, continually updated payer and clinical knowledge, and back-office processing specialists into a single service. The results are: faster payment at lower cost, improved patient care, higher revenue retention and less hassle for the thousands of providers using athenahealth nationwide.
What does CCHIT certification mean?
As a CCHIT Certified product, the web-based athenaClinicals EMR software has been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a comprehensive set of criteria for:
- Functionality (ability to create and manage electronic records for all patients, as well as automating workflow in a physician’s office),
- Interoperability (a first step in the ability to receive and send electronic data to other entities such as laboratories), and
- Security (ability to keep patients’ information safe).
The CCHIT Certified mark – a “seal of approval” for EHR products – provides the first consensus-based, consistent benchmark for ambulatory products. By looking to products with the CCHIT Certified seal, physicians and other providers can be assured they are making a reliable investment and insurers and other payers know the products meet expected industry standards.
How rigorous are CCHIT standards?
CCHIT’s certification compliance criteria and its design for a certification inspection process have been thoroughly researched, taking into account the state of the art of EHRs and available standards, and comparing certification processes in other industries and other countries. The inspection process is based on real-life medical scenarios designed to test products rigorously against the clinical needs of providers and the quality and safety needs of healthcare consumers and payers. One script, for example, recreates a scenario of an elderly man with poorly controlled diabetes, hypertension and other chronic conditions in order to test EHR functions such as potential adverse drug reactions, disease management and treatment plans.
“Our practice has been a long-time user of athenahealth’s athenaCollector revenue cycle management service and felt athenaClinicals provided a truly different approach than software-only EMRs,” said Thomas Mohr, M.D., president of Pediatric Partners, MPC, a multi-location group based in Temecula, California. “Given the massive amount of paper that comes into any medical office, having a centrally hosted EMR service that scans and categorizes every incoming fax, then matches clinical documents to existing patients and patient orders has given our group an incredible amount of process control on both the clinical and operational fronts.”