CCHIT halts interim Meaningful Use Certification pending publication of NIST test scripts

A friend of mine just sent out the following note:

There have been developments in the last few days that have caused CCHIT to pause “providing direction on the requirements for test step demonstration for the Interim Final Rule Stage 1 criteria. The reason is because NIST is now publishing Test Methods and Procedures on their website that Certifying Bodies will have to comply with.  Therefore, we (CCHIT) will be reviewing their published materials and revising our test scripts for Meaningful Use to match.  You can see what they are developing at http://healthcare.NIST.gov and clicking on the box that has Meaningful Use in it.  You will see that they are publishing their materials in 4 “Waves”, and they have only completed Wave 1.  Expected timeframe for completion of Wave 4 is unknown, but we are hoping it will be by the end of April.  CCHIT will take the published materials from NIST to develop Test Scripts to test Meaningful Use technology compliance for Stage 1.  We hope to be able to start this testing in May.  In the meantime, we will be removing all the Meaningful Use specific test steps out of our Comprehensive test scripts and completely separating the Comprehensive and Meaningful Use testing processes.”

The quote above came from CCHIT and I’ve been looking at the materials at NIST.gov since the end of February. It’s good stuff. The draft test procedures are already online while the final procedures won’t be up for a few months I think.

UPDATE: Sue Reber from CCHIT indicated that they didn’t put out this statement today. So, treat the information as rumor until they provide additional information in the next few weeks.

UPDATE 03-15-2010: CCHIT just posted the following on their certification overview site so it’s confirmed that the IFR certification is officially on hold now:

(Update Note: We have reviewed the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding certifying bodies, and we feel confident about our prospects of becoming accredited.  We plan to file an application with the Office of the National Coordinator as soon as it is ready to accept them. Until CCHIT becomes accredited, we are suspending any initial or incremental Modular testing until we can test against an accredited Stage 1 ARRA test script.)