Dive Brief:
- The ONC has voted to do a Kaizen study of its EMR vendor certification process — an end-to-end analysis — to determine what has been lacking in that process.
- Kaizen, meaning "continuous improvement," is a Japanese business management technique that is considered akin to agile or lean business tactics. The approach has been deployed by ONC before to improve quality measure development for Stage 3 meaningful use.
- The Kaizen technique, which could help the ONC make the certification process more limited in scope, would involve gathering representatives from policymakers, certification bodies, vendors, providers and others with with a stake in the process to fully understand how meaningful use certified products work and make that process better.
Dive Insight:
Kaizen may allow the committee to shave down certification to a few critical elements, which will probably include interoperability, the right clinical quality measures and privacy/security. It will do so by finding out what has been working in what certification challenges had emerged under Stages 1 and 2. With any luck this will allow certification for Stage 3 to go more smoothly than for the previous two stages, which were dogged by extensive vendor complaints about the timeline they had to adopt requirements.