ehr onc final certification - Department of Health Care Services

Comments. Several commenters requested further clarification regarding the
meaning of “patient's clinical information.” Other commenters stated that this phrase was
too vague and was not included as part of the proposed meaningful use objective or
measure and should therefore be removed. Some commenters requested further
definition of the term “specific conditions,” particularly to clarify whether this term refers
to problems and diagnoses. Clarification was also requested regarding whether this
information includes: a patient summary; the patient's entire medical history; and patient
encounter notes. One commenter recommended that we clarify how the lists must be
structured and suggested that we specify time periods for patient histories. One
commenter requested clarification of the term “output,” and suggested that it should
mean to produce a list for internal use and that it does not refer to exporting the patient
list to a system or destination external to the office of an eligible professional.
Response. We appreciate the concerns raised by these commenters and after
further consideration agree that the terms referenced by commenters could be interpreted
in multiple ways. Accordingly we have removed “patient’s clinical information” and
“specific conditions” from the certification criterion, and have reframed the certification
criterion to more directly align with the meaningful use measure by changing “output” to
“generate.” We sought to clarify that we intended that Certified EHR technology would
be capable of electronically producing or “generating” patient lists for an eligible
professional or eligible hospital’s subsequent use. We do not require as a condition of
certification that time periods be associated with a patient list, but presumably time (i.e.,
the age of the information) could be one factor an eligible professional or eligible hospital
could also use to sort their lists (e.g., patients with XYZ problem recorded in the past 3
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