BARRINGTON, IL - The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT®) 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 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 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.

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