As the co-founder of a company building medical coding tools, I am extremely frustrated by the combination of AMA’s copyright on the CPT code set and CMS’s requirement that primary health organizations indirectly purchase multiple copies of an AMA licenses.

This environment clearly stifles to innovation, especially as new high quality & low cost products come to market. The fact that every system a provider uses that leverages CPT codes must pay a licensing fee (EMR + encoder + billing services = $25 x 3/user/year) means that providers are paying multiple times for precisely the same information.

I would like to help raise awareness of this issue, be a part of a coalition to address it, and eventually see an equitable system put in place. Do you know of any efforts to address this issue that I and my organization might be able to contribute our time & voice to? If not, where would you suggest someone start to build a coalition of interested parties?

Thank you for your time and all of your efforts.

Along the lines of self-testing suggested by Tim, shouldn’t the Laika project be useful as a standardized tool for certification testing? Perhaps that or something like it could be used for a truly open testing model for verification and validation of EHR testing.

http://laika.sourceforge.net/

-Lorie

-keith

The close linkages between standards bodies and certifications lead to me to believe that certification has other, business objectives as well that are not explicity stated.

It’s all well and good to declare oneself the protector of all things good but the kind of top down spread of assertions is something that FOSS has always had a problem with. The very phenomena of ‘forking’, which has a long cultural history outside of software, especially among societies which value freedom, is more of a bottom up to the middle and then out to side reaction against the inevitable rigidity of top down organization!

FOSS software is, at it’s best, the small upstart business, which exists as a viable niche because of the failures of the larger and more rigid software industry.

So, to the extent that certification does have a business model, and uses money to create a ‘trade association’ of the status quo, there will always be a tension between FOSS and certification.

This PROVES the validity of the FOSS process.

There will be those that claim self-certification via CCHIT but they won’t last long. They will easily be discovered through functionality defects and lack of interoperability. Their lack of integrity will be well noted in blogs and on mailing lists.

Maybe the one thing that CCHIT attorney’s could do is draft a provision for self-certification that will give the individual/company the right to claim that they have self-certified but they they can be held liable to customers and maybe even patients?

This is starting to sound better as I think out loud here. The FOSS application is available, the test scripts are available. The potential customer can do their own verification on all or selected sections of the application.

Let the big commercial vendors spend their money on the CCHIT seal. Small and FOSS vendors can self-certify and put their integrity where the mouth is.

–Tim