In 2017 we announced “A 5-Year Goal to Transition the ONC Health IT Certification Program’s Testing Portfolio” to include as many industry-developed and maintained testing tools as possible. This month, we reached another important milestone toward this goal: the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) has formally taken over the stewardship of the electronic prescribing testing tool approved for use under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) Health IT Certification Program (Certification Program).

Since the Certification Program began, ONC has collaborated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and industry stakeholders such as NCPDP to develop an electronic conformance testing tool for NCPDP’s SCRIPT standard. As of this August, NCPDP will now support and maintain this ONC-approved testing tool used to test and provide assurance that health information technology (health IT) is conformant to the ONC-required SCRIPT v10.6 standard.

This tool’s migration to NCPDP provides an opportunity to strengthen the testing infrastructure for e-prescribing.

We look forward to continued collaboration with NCPDP and other health IT stakeholders as we expand our testing portfolio with a diverse mix of testing tools that can help to optimize the testing experience. For information on how to submit test tools, test procedures, and test data for approval and use under the Certification Program, please review the Federal Register notice we previously published. If you are interested in becoming a program partner for developing testing methods, contact onc.certification@hhs.gov.