Clarifications:
- For the public health certification criteria in § 170.315(f), health IT will only need to be certified to those criteria that are required to meet the measures the provider intends to report on to meet Objective 8: Public Health and Clinical Data Registry Reporting.
- This certification criterion is intended for technology used in the inpatient (including emergency departments) setting.
- There is no transport standard required for this criterion. [see also 77 FR 54247]
- The NIST Electronic Laboratory Reporting (ELR) Test Tool tests conformance to the requirements in HL7® Version 2.5.1 Implementation Guide (IG): Electronic Laboratory Reporting to Public Health, Release 1 with Errata and Clarifications, and ELR 2.5.1 Clarification Document for EHR Technology Certification. In the Implementation Guide, RE means “Required, but may be empty” and is not an optional requirement. That is, an RE element is required to be implemented in the EHR technology, but operationally the data may or may not be present (depending on business rules and data availability). The Alternate and non-Alternate data elements have been specified as RE in the IG to ensure the technology can support (receive, process, store, send, etc.) both types (whether or not a particular installation site utilizes/needs this capability is irrelevant for certification testing, which is focused on making sure that buyers of certified EHR technology have the capability). Any Text for Patients and Provider are also RE, and therefore not optional for certification. With regard to repeatable fields, Patient Name (PID.5) can have unlimited repeated instances, and the IG indicates that supporting repeatable fields is a requirement. To support this requirement, the ELR Test Tool and Test Data ensure certified technology can support a minimum of two instances of PID.5.
- The CDC has published the Reportable Condition Mapping Table (RCMT) that provides a subset of LOINC® and SNOMED CT® codes associated with reportable conditions. RCMT can be obtained from CDC vocabulary server PHIN VADS. [see also 77 FR 54247]
- LOINC® SDO has created a tool known as “RELMA,” which helps to map the local tests to standard LOINC® laboratory tests. LOINC® SDO provides RELMA training twice a year and, through a partnership with LOINC® SDO, the CDC provides RELMA training to the public health community at least twice a year with a special focus on microbiology lab tests. [see also 77 FR 54247]
