Standards and Certification are needed to identify and harmonize technical standards related to health information exchange. To accomplish this, there is a need to oversee the development and presentation of use cases, to coordinate work with the Health IT Standards Panel (HITSP) and the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) effort, and to support the certification efforts of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) in its certification and accreditation activities.

Software applications must 'speak the same language' to be able to work together. This involves creating, testing, and adopting interoperability standards that will allow systems across the health care market to move health information seamlessly. HITSP was established to be a multi-stakeholder, consensus-based body designed to provide the process where representatives from all aspects of health care select and harmonize standards to support the priorities it receives. Currently, volunteers from over 500 healthcare-related organizations support and participate in HITSP. Priority areas for standards development were highlighted (or "prioritized") in the past by AHIC, appropriate use cases were developed, and HITSP took on the task of harmonizing existing standards and developing specifications to support other work in these areas.

Providers and consumers must be able to have confidence that the electronic health information products and systems they use are secure, can maintain data confidentiality as directed by patients and consumers, can work with other systems to share information, and can perform a set of well-defined functions. CCHIT, created in 2005, helps accomplish these goals. The CCHIT certifies provider-based ambulatory care electronic health records (EHRs) and inpatient EHRs through a public-private process that develops specific criteria for health IT systems and then rigorously evaluates them to determine that they truly meet the criteria for:

• Functionality - ensuring that the systems can support the activities and perform the functions for which they are intended;
• Security - ensuring that systems can protect and maintain the confidentiality of data entrusted to them; and
• Interoperability - ensuring that systems implement the recognized standards and can exchange information and work with other systems.