A. Hoerbst, E. Ammenwerth: Quality and certification of electronic health records – An overview of current approaches from the US and Europe Quality and Certification of Electronic Health Records An overview of current approaches from the US and Europe

Background: Numerous projects, initiatives, and programs are dedicated to the development of Elec-tronic Health Records (EHR) worldwide. Increasingly more of these plans have recently been brought from a scientific environment to real life applications. In this context, quality is a crucial factor with re-gard to the acceptance and utility of Electronic Health Records. However, the dissemination of the ex-isting quality approaches is often rather limited. Objectives: The present paper aims at the description and comparison of the current major quality certification approaches to EHRs. Methods: A literature analysis was carried out in order to identify the relevant publications with re-gard to EHR quality certification. PubMed, ACM Digital Library, IEEExplore, CiteSeer, and Google (Scholar) were used to collect relevant sources. The documents that were obtained were analyzed us-ing techniques of qualitative content analysis. Results: The analysis discusses and compares the quality approaches of CCHIT, EuroRec, IHE, openEHR, and EN13606. These approaches differ with regard to their focus, support of service-oriented EHRs, process of (re-)certification and testing, number of systems certified and tested, supporting or-ganizations, and regional relevance