New EHR Certifying Body – Drummond Group CEO Interview Highlights

Healthcare Informatics has been doing a number of really interesting interviews lately. One of their most recent ones is an interview with RiK Drummond, CEO of The Drummond Group. You may have seen that the Drummond Group will be certifying EHR for ARRA funding. So the interview with Rik Drummond is pretty interesting. It is in 2 parts, but here are some highlights from the first part (since the second part isn’t up yet):

In regards to the cost of EHR certification (looks like Drummond Group EHR certification could still be pricey):

GUERRA: So you don’t have a better sense of whether they feel the current pricing is too high or if the certification process is too long? You’re not getting a more definite sense of what it is they’re coming to you for?

DRUMMOND: We’ve been kind of overwhelmed with a lot of this for the last three or four weeks, so we’re going back to interview some of them just to see what the actual problem is. I should know more in probably three or four weeks.

I expect that this is like normal testing where pricing is always an issue. Every test that anyone does, people think it’s too high because it’s one more cost to add in the end. The flipside is we find that once people understand what pricing gives them – it’s almost the last part of their software cycle – they see the cost is not nearly as high as they would anticipate, because it’s a cost of shifting from internal testing to external testing, and it also gives them a big marketing boon because someone is stamping their seal of approval on you, you’ve met these conditions. And that marketing boon is worth anything, you pay for that sort of thing.

In regards to establishing the EHR criteria and CCHIT certification (glad to see they like the separation of requirements making and requirements testing):

DRUMMOND: We think it’s very important to keep the stakeholder groups who define the requirement areas distinct from the testing parts, if at all possible. That doesn’t mean it can’t be the same organization, but it means you have to have some really clear boundaries. So CCHIT has both of those combined, and we always try to avoid having those two combined very closely.

Our focus would be very much on working with CCHIT, our working in parallel with them, but we all have to use exactly the same test criteria to make this whole thing work. So it has to be defined somehow so that happens. We need to focus on the technical aspects in making everything come together appropriately, so that when people go buy these products they can say, “Well, I’m one step into meaningful use. I have one key component in place. Now, I have to show how I use it to get the rest of it.”

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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