The CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology designated the first two electronic health-record systems to test whether EHRs are interoperable as required under the Stage 2 criteria of the government's incentive program for the meaningful use of health IT.
The Stage 2 rules, now in effect for qualifying hospitals and qualifying physicians and other “eligible professionals,” require providers to swap a summary of a patient's care record with other providers using at least one EHR system from a developer different than their own. At a minimum, they must conduct one or more tests of a swap with EHRs selected by the CMS to serve as test systems in a federal test bed environment created for this purpose.
