On April 7 CCHIT will offer Preliminary ARRA Certfication with free bridge to Final

CCHIT has probably been hearing lots of rumblings about the ONC and HHS’s inability to provide meaningful use certification fast enough for providers and hospitals to get start with product and vendor selection. At healthSystemCIO.com Anthony reports that CCHIT will be offering, staring in just a couple of weeks, their Preliminary ARRA Certification once again. According the healthSystemCIO:

The program materials, including revised program policies, applications, criteria, test scripts and other guidance will be available at http://www.cchit.org/get_certified beginning on April 7.

Although I have no inside knowledge, I suspect that so many vendors are complaining about lack of sufficient speed by ONC that CCHIT either felt the need on its own to restart its preliminary program or was nudged by ONC to do so. What I like about the new Preliminary offering is what Mark Leavitt said about the free retest (emphasis mine):

Preliminary ARRA — a certification program that tests Complete EHRs or EHR Modules against the Meaningful Use Stage 1 certification criteria in the Interim Final Rule (IFR) issued by HHS/ONC in January. The Preliminary ARRA program is designed to demonstrate that a vendor’s product is “extremely well prepared to be certified” once ONC-accredited testing and certification becomes available (but the final criteria and test procedures are not yet available, nor has CCHIT been accredited yet by ONC). “When those events occur, CCHIT will replace the Preliminary ARRA program with a final, ONC-accredited ARRA certification program. Vendors with Preliminary ARRA certification can undergo retesting by CCHIT at no additional cost to receive a fully-accredited certification once it is available.”