Certified Health Information Technology Reported by Hospitals for Promoting Interoperability Performance

In 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) established the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs to encourage eligible professionals (EPs), eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAHs) to adopt, implement, upgrade, and demonstrate meaningful use of certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT).

To continue a commitment to promoting and prioritizing interoperability and exchange of health care data, CMS renamed the EHR Incentive Programs to the Medicare and Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Programs in April 2018. This change moved the programs beyond the existing requirements of meaningful use to a new phase of EHR measurement with an increased focus on interoperability and improving patient access to health information.

The “Certified Health Information Technology Reported by Hospitals for Promoting Interoperability Performance” datasets combine CMS Hospital Promoting Interoperability (PI) participation data with the ONC Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL). The Hospital PI datasets provide the certified EHR technology (CEHRT) reported by all hospitals who reported for Promoting Interoperability, beginning in program year 2023. This data field can be merged with the CHPL data to provide specific certified product details.

These datasets provide a minimum set of data fields to further combine these data with CMS hospital datasets, the full CHPL dataset, and other datasets. The documentation and notes describe those data fields necessary for linking to other data. See Methods and Notes for further details on dataset construction and data linkages.

Source data:

CMS Promoting Interoperability - Hospital data

ONC Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL)

Construction of the file

The Hospital Promoting Interoperability (PI) data include a field “CEHRT.ID”. This ID is generated by hospitals through a tool hosted by ONC on the CHPL website. Hospitals select the certified technology from the CHPL database (using the website interface) they used during their performance reporting period and the CHPL generates a unique ID they can submit as part of their PI submission. This ID is maintained by ONC and its contractors in the CHPL database.

The CHPL through its public APIs and a website tool enables queries of single CEHRT IDs. Full access to the entire list of all CEHRT IDs ever generated is not available to the public. The merge between the CEHRT ID list and the Hospital PI data was completed by ONC and provided here for public use. The data is updated regularly to reflect current certified product listing information.

A small percentage of the IDs in the Hospital PI data (data field = CEHRT.ID) were found to be invalid when merged with the full CEHRT ID database. Invalid IDs were matched to the ONC CEHRT ID database using a fuzzy matching algorithm and deemed accurate with a LV of 1 or 2. This corrected the ID in almost all cases as minor imputation errors during submission likely resulted in the invalid IDs. Some manual corrections were necessary.

Data linkages

Data variables that can be used for additional data linkages are below.

Facility.ID = This is the hospital’s CMS Certification Number (CCN) assigned to the hospital when they enrolled in Medicare. This is a unique, common identifier used to link hospitals across health care datasets where hospsitals are identified.

chpl_id = The Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) ID. CHPL IDs are unique to each certified product listing. This can be used to merge these data with additional data variables in the CHPL using the downloadable CHPL data or the CHPL public APIs.

product_database_id = The product database ID associated with the certified product listing. This is used as part of the CHPL public APIs to identify unique certified product listings. It can used to fetch data for the unique certified product listing using the CHPL website and its public APIs.