Department of Health and Human Services August 4, 2006 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

By this document we are informing the public of the Secretary's recognition of certain Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) criteria for ambulatory EHR functionality, interoperability, security and reliability standards. This list of recognized criteria is available by clicking the applicable link at https://www.hhs.gov/healthit. The CCHIT was created in 2004 by an industry coalition of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the National Alliance for Health Information Technology. CCHIT's mission is to accelerate the adoption of HIT by creating an efficient, credible and sustainable product certification program. During the three comment cycles that generated the ambulatory EHR criteria that the Secretary has recognized, CCHIT received over 1500 comments from a wide range of stakeholders. Further outreach was achieved through the establishment of several large Town Hall presentations with attendances in the range of 500-1000 at Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conferences as well as at more than thirty smaller presentations to a variety of associations, organizations and the press gatherings. CCHIT grouped its ambulatory EHR certification criteria recommendations into three groups, ``functionality,'' ``interoperability'' and ``security/reliability.'' For ease of understanding, the Secretary broke the security and reliability recommendations into separate categories. Definitions of these categories, and an example that illuminates the various functions of each category are as follows: 1. Functionality criteria identify minimum required and provisional product features for documenting and managing a typical patient encounter. For example, a physician needs to be able to access his/her patient's laboratory test results, so an example of a functional requirement is that an EHR would need to provide the capability of displaying laboratory test results. 2. Interoperability criteria establish standards for how products interact with other products within and across care settings. For example, to ensure interoperability, the physician EHR noted above would need to be able to receive laboratory test results from another physician's (within care settings) as well as from laboratory systems (across care settings). 3. Security and reliability criteria are designed to help the security inspector assess a product's ability to protect, manage and audit access to sensitive patient data. For clarity, we have broken these criteria into the two separate categories, security and reliability. a. Security \1\ addresses the appropriate access to data by appropriate parties and the protection of data from improper manipulation. For example, laboratory test results should be accessible to a treating physician, but inaccessible to a clerical employee who does not need such access to accomplish their job. Security also involves ensuring that data have not been altered or tampered with.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice concerning the final effect of the HHS decision to designate a class of employees at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), Mercury, Nevada, as an addition to the Special Exposure Cohort (SEC) under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000. On June 26, 2006, as provided for under 42 U.S.C. 7384q(b), the Secretary of HHS designated the following class of employees as an addition to the SEC:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) gives notice as required by 42 CFR 83.12(e) of a decision to evaluate a petition to designate a class of employees at General Atomics (also known as GA, and/or Division of General Dynamics, and/or John Jay Hopkins Laboratory for Pure and Applied Science), to be included in the Special Exposure Cohort under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000. The initial proposed definition for the class being evaluated, subject to revision as warranted by the evaluation, is as follows: Facility: General Atomics. Location: La Jolla, California. Job Titles and/or Job Duties: Potentially worked in the locations: [cir] Building 2 (Science laboratories A, B, and C). [cir] Building 9 (Experimental Building). [cir] Building 10 (Maintenance). [cir] Building 11 (Service Building). [cir] Building 21. [cir] Building 22. [cir] Building 23 (Hot Cell Facility). [cir] Building 25. [cir] Building 26. [cir] Building 27 (Experimental Area Building 1). [cir] Building 27-1 (Experimental Area Building 1). [cir] Building 30 (LINAC Complex). [cir] Building 31 (HTGR-TCF). [cir] Building 33 (Fusion Building). [cir] Building 34 (Fusion Doublet III). [cir] Building 37 (SV-A). [cir] Building 39 (SV-B). [cir] SV-D. Period of Employment: January 1, 1960 through December 31, 1969.