January 9, 2008 - The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology with its software design partner, the MITRE Corp., stated that their work to build a testing tool to evaluate compliance of electronic health records (EHR) with criteria for interoperability, named project LAIKA, will be further advanced by the Commission’s collaboration with two organizations that play major roles in healthcare IT connectivity.
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have worked with the Certification Commission to produce a “framework” document that clarifies each organization’s specific role in developing testing tools for product connectivity and describes how they complement each other. The Certification Commission, IHE and NIST, along with their partners, will collaborate to build healthcare IT testing tools, in order to minimize duplication of effort and provide consistency in testing and standards compliance.
The newly formed collaboration will aim to make it easier for health information technology companies to add standards-based information exchange capabilities to their products and prepare those products for certification and distribution.
Testing software, LAIKA, is being developed under an open source license so that it is free and publicly available, and the Certification Commission will use the software running on a secure platform during its inspection of a product’s compliance. An initial focus of the collaboration is a tool to verify standards compliance of a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) sent or received by EHRs with delivery in time for the Commission’s 2008 pilot testing and certification launch.
For more information: www.cchit.org
June 14, 2024 
