By Rob Anthony, ONC
Twitter: @ONC_HealthIT
ONC has approved the Drummond Group’s Drummond G10+ FHIR API powered by Touchstone tool, a new alternative test method (ATM) for testing conformance to ONC’s §170.315(g)(10) Standardized API for patient and population services certification criterion. Through this new ATM, software developers will now have a new option for conformance testing in addition to the previously approved Inferno (g)(10) Standardized API Test Kit. The approval of Drummond’s testing method continues ONC’s mission to further diversify the suite of test methods used as part of the ONC Health IT Certification Program.
In August 2017, ONC introduced a five-year goal to transition and diversify the ONC Health IT Certification Program’s testing portfolio. Since that announcement, ONC has stewarded several ATMs, including the HIMSS Immunization Integration Program (IIP) open-source testing tool developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA), and HIMSS.
The newly approved ATM reflects regulatory requirements from both ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, as well as other FHIR use cases to facilitate industry adoption. Drummond’s FHIR certification program is powered by the Touchstone global testing platform, which has been built to test at scale and ensure conformance to nationally published standards. Touchstone supports testing implementations focused on interoperability standards including HL7® FHIR®. Touchstone is hosted by AEGIS in a private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud for testing purposes and supported certification programs such as the ONC (g)(10) Standardized API for patient and population services criterion. The Touchstone platform enables the community to dynamically build, publish, and calibrate basic to complex test cases for client or server message exchanges, including workflow type scenarios (peer-to-peer and multi-actor) using the HL7 FHIR Testing Infrastructure specification and associated FHIR resources like FHIR TestScript.
If your organization has invested in health IT testing methods, please look at the 2015 Edition and the 2015 Edition Cures Update certification criteria to see if such testing methods could be evaluated for approval as an ATM for the ONC Health IT Certification Program. ONC is committed to making the certification process efficient for developers and effective for users of health IT to improve the quality of care for all patients.
Please submit an inquiry on the ONC Health IT Feedback and Inquiry Portal if you would like more information about having a testing method approved as an ATM in the ONC Health IT Certification Program.
This post was originally published on the Health IT Buzz and is syndicated here with permission.