Comments on: And then there were 2: Drummond Group Plans to Certify Electronic Health Records

By: sanberdino9

sanberdino9 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:21:17 +0000

Have to respond here. Rik Drummond is one of the smartest, nicest and most charitable people I have ever met. If you think anybody, much less the Drummond Group, can influence Walmart to do anything they don't want to do then you need to drive your butt to rural Northwest Arkansas and you just try to sell Walmart something. Maybe 3 years later Walmart will give you 1/10 of a penney on the dollar. There is nothing wrong with open source models, nothing wrong with for profit models and nothing wrong with for profit compliance services. Its a free market dude.

By: sanberdino9

sanberdino9 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:21:17 +0000

By: Shahid N. Shah

Shahid N. Shah — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:21:34 +0000

Danmunro, I think you're probably right. All this is too early to talk about until the government gets its documents prepared but I hope your right and we won't need any of these certifications bodies to get “certified”. Some “self certification” ability would be great.

By: danmunro

danmunro — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:43:35 +0000

I actually see this as somewhat moot. Federal $'s (Meaningful Use) will become the ultimate arbiter – not some 3rd party. CCHIT and Drummond are just hoping they can be middle men in that process. It's still too early – but I do question how much either of them (and others to follow) will actually be needed.

By: Shahid N. Shah

Shahid N. Shah — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:48:09 +0000

Earl and Ralph, thanks for the comments; I don’t know much about Drummond and was just happy to see that there was a second entity interested in certifications (which will hopefully mean others might join).

Perhaps some of us should get together and form a non-profit open-source (using creative commons materials) company that creates all the test cases and stuff and lets any company run the certifications?

By: Ralph F Potter

Ralph F Potter — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:45:23 +0000

This is very bad – do you know the Drummond groups history or do you have an interest in the group? This is a company that while adding no value to AS2, managed to screw many companies out of a lot of money through a similar schema – please vote no any any opportunity!

By: EarlW

EarlW — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 21:24:48 +0000

No, I think it’s terrible news. Drummond Group singlehandedly crippled the EDI AS2 business. Here are the facts: R.Drummond was one of the writers of RFC 4130, which defined the secure interchange of data over HTTP. This is also known as EDI-INT or AS2. Drummond Group then went into business ‘certifying’ AS2 software. Their charge for certification? $60,000 for certification plus $25,000 per year. Then they convinced WalMart to insist that any AS2 software used with them was ‘Drummond Certified’. This certification in no way guaranteed that two systems were able to communicate. It only made a lot of money for Drummond and made it impossible for open-source solutions to compete.

Now they want to certify EHR? Give me a break.

You had better ask them “How much will it cost”, before assuming this is good news.

PS: Walmart no longer requires that AS2 software be ‘Drummond Certified’.