ehr onc final certification - Department of Health Care Services

Comment. A couple of commenters requested clarification on what CPOE means
in the certification criterion. A commenter requested that ONC clarify that this
certification criterion applies only to the order-entry workflow and is not applicable to
other office processes or work flows which might involve the same clinical data but
which would not necessarily generate these alerts.
Response. We clarify for commenters that our inclusion of CPOE in the
certification criterion is meant to indicate that notifications should occur based on new
medication orders, in addition to a patient’s current medications and medication allergies,
as they are being entered. In response to the other commenter’s request for clarification,
we believe that notifications will occur during the order-entry workflow.
Comment. A commenter requested that the rule be clarified to explicitly require
that drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug formulary checks occur based on information and
medication lists in an individual’s complete medical record derived from all relevant
providers, not only the drug list of the specific provider.
Response. We clarify that we expect Certified EHR Technology to perform drug-
drug and drug-allergy checks based on medication list and medication allergy list
information included within Certified EHR Technology as structured data. We recognize
that Certified EHR Technology may also store health information in scanned documents,
images, and other non-interoperable non-computable formats and, consequently, do not
expect Certified EHR Technology to be capable of reading or accessing the information
in these other formats for the purposes of performing drug-drug and drug-allergy checks.
Comment. A commenter requested that ONC clarify that EHR vendors will not
be required to remove the option to disable drug-drug and drug-allergy checks.
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