News Feature | July 29, 2014

EHNAC Launches ACO, Practice Management Accreditation Programs

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Practice Management Accreditation Programs

The programs are designed to certify entities for meeting best practices.

The Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission, which certifies entities that process transactions or exchange health information for meeting best practices, has created two new accreditation programs for accountable care organizations and physician practice management systems.

Designed using input from a wide range of stakeholders, the ACO program focuses on accountable care organizations, payers and the vendors that serve them. The first organizations who will complete the final test accreditation program before the formal launch later this year are Capital Clinical Integrated Network, a Medicaid ACO in Washington, D.C., and vendor HEALTHEC which offers a platform with a suite of software and services to support ACOs.

The program “gives a third-party stamp of approval to those ACO stakeholders who have demonstrated the secure management of protected health information and can provide assurances to their overall corporate integrity and trust between entities,” says Lee Barrett, executive director of industry-supported EHNAC. The organization has offered a range of accreditation programs during the past 20 years.

EHNAC launched the practice management systems accreditation program in partnership with the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, with input from a variety of stakeholders. Three vendors – GE Healthcare, NextGen Healthcare Information Systems and MedInformatix – are the pilot sites before the program is launched to other vendors, which is anticipated in the third quarter of 2014.

“Our accreditation program will allow vendors to demonstrate their adherence to a higher standard of quality, privacy and security, and will create a trustworthy framework with providers and their practice management system vendors,” says Barrett.

Criteria in the program covers a suite of expected functionality covering technical performance, business processes and resource management, as well as compliance with HIPAA privacy/security/transaction standards/CORE operating rules, and readiness to support ICD-10 in 2015.