29 Aug GE Healthcare's Centricity enterprise receives CCHIT certification
Barrington, Ill. – The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) today announced that GE Healthcare IT’s product Centricity Enterprise Version 6.7 is pre-market, conditionally CCHIT Certified, and meets the Commission’s inpatient electronic health record (EHR) criteria for 2007. Inpatient EHRs are designed for use in acute care hospitals. Pre-market, conditionally certified EHRs are new products that are fully certified once their operational use in a hospital site has been verified. The Commission – an independent, nonprofit organization – is the Recognized Certification Body in the United States for certifying health information technology products.
¨In addition to meeting foundation standards such as security, certified inpatient products are examined for clinician order entry (often called CPOE) and medication administration capabilities (often called eMAR), including related clinical decision support. As a CCHIT Certified product, Centricity Enterprise has been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a set of criteria for CPOE and eMAR. The Commission focused certification testing on these areas first because they have the lowest rate of adoption in hospitals but are thought to offer the highest value for improvement of care.
“The thorough inspection process ensures that certified products have demonstrated their ability to have a positive impact on the quality and safety of patient care,” said Mark Leavitt, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Commission. “I’d like to congratulate the certified product companies, who now represent the leading edge in advanced EHR products for the inpatient setting.”
The CCHIT Certified mark — a “seal of approval” for EHR products — provides the first consensus-based, government-recognized benchmark for inpatient EHR products. By looking to products with the CCHIT Certified seal, acute care providers can reduce their risk in selecting EHR products for CPOE and eMAR.
“CCHIT’s certification of Centricity Enterprise represents our consistent push for quality, innovation and industry achievement. As Centricity Enterprise continues to evolve to meet the future needs of our customers, we’ll continue to push product excellence as a solution to meet the diversified needs of our customer base,” said Laurent Rotival, General Manager and Vice President, GE Healthcare IT.
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 a middle-aged man admitted through the emergency department after sustaining fractures in an automobile accident. The script tests the ability of the EHR to provide clinical decision support during the ordering and administration of medications, and to track whether laboratory and radiology orders have been entered and received.
About CCHIT
The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) is an independent, nonprofit organization that has been named by the federal government as the Recognized Certification Body for health information technology. Its mission is to accelerate the adoption of health information technology by creating a credible, sustainable certification program. The certification requirements are based on widely accepted industry standards and involve the work of hundreds of expert volunteers and input from a variety of stakeholders throughout the health care industry. More information on CCHIT and CCHIT Certified products is available at www.cchit.org.
ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE: ¨GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat, and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
¨GE Healthcare’s broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new “early health” model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection, and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.