Fred Trotter has a wrap up of the recent HIMSS CCHIT certification meeting on F/OSS. “Take away lessons:

 

• Under the current model it is difficult to have the cost and benefit of the certification evenly distributed.
• There is no way to easily ’share’ the certification
• There is no maintainable benefit to being the organization that sacrifices to get a certification for a particular FOSS codebase.
• It is not possible to prevent other organizations to certify a system that has already been certified.
• Proprietary ontologies, like CPT, are a problem for the distribution of FOSS EHR systems.