ONC Approves New Testing Method for Standardized API Criterion

ONC has approved a new alternative test method (ATM) from The Drummond Group for testing conformance to ONC’s §170.315(g)(10) Standardized API for patient and population services certification criterion.

The Drummond G10+ FHIR API powered by Touchstone tool provides health IT developers a new option for conformance testing in addition to the previously approved Inferno (g)(10) Standardized API Test Kit.

The approval of the new testing method furthers ONC’s goal to diversify further the suite of test methods used for the ONC Health IT Certification Program, ONC official Rob Anthony said in a HealthITBuzz blog post.

In August 2017, ONC announced a five-year goal to transition and expand the ONC Health IT Certification Program’s testing portfolio. Since then, ONC has stewarded several ATMs, such as the HIMSS Immunization Integration Program (IPP) open-source testing tool developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA), and HIMSS.

The newly approved ATM supports regulatory requirements from both ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and other FHIR use cases. Anthony said that Drummond’s FHIR certification program is powered by the Touchstone global testing platform, which ensures conformance to nationally published standards.

“Touchstone supports testing implementations focused on interoperability standards, including HL7 FHIR,” Anthony wrote. “Touchstone is hosted by AEGIS in a private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud for testing purposes and supported certification programs such as the ONC (g)(10) Standardized API for patient and population services criterion.”

The Touchstone platform allows the health IT developer community to build, publish, and adjust test cases for client or server message exchanges using the HL7 FHIR Testing Infrastructure specification and associated FHIR resources.

“If your organization has invested in health IT testing methods, please look at the 2015 Edition and the 2015 Edition Cures Update certification criteria to see if such testing methods could be evaluated for approval as an ATM for the ONC Health IT Certification Program,” Anthony said. “ONC is committed to making the certification process efficient for developers and effective for users of health IT to improve the quality of care for all patients.”