Non-Pay Source for MU Requirements

stephen-smith wrote on Tuesday, November 30, 2010:

NIST Meaningful Use Testing Requirements

NIST (A U.S. Federal Standards Organization) has published testing guidelines for MU Certification for Qualified / Complete EMR solutions.  This collection of PDFs quote the relevant for-pay standards enough to indicate what features must be present and specifies exactly how testing should proceed, including what the vendor (us, or a reseller) has to provide to the testing organization.

It would be nice to track conformance to these documents in tandem with the existing MU barometer, for developers and users without access to the for-pay standards.  I was thinking expanding the existing wiki pages to include links to these documents and the vendor-provided information.  Also, it would be nice to be able to “point to” the parts of the code that implement these features as targets for both unit testers and “high-profile” / “hot” code locations for patch reviewers.

I’m not sure how this ties into any use outside the U.S., but I feel my local organization will probably be use these documents as short- to mid-term targets for improvements to OpenEMR.

stephen-smith wrote on Tuesday, November 30, 2010:

It looks like ViCare+ is already tracking some NIST test results on the wiki but the layout seems a bit awkward.  In particular it is hard to correlate the NIST documents with the names of the tests there.  The criteria # isn’t mentioned outside of the PDFs and the test used for linking isn’t always the same as the criteria name used by NIST.

Firstly, props to ViCare+ for performing the testing and publishing the results.  However, I am going to experiment with reworking that wiki page to make it easier to track against the current NIST work while preserving all the recorded progress.

tmccormi wrote on Tuesday, November 30, 2010:

I love it when people use the wiki for what it is supposed to be, a collaborative effort!  Kudos Stephen!
-Tony