CareCloud, Inc. announced its electronic health record (EHR) platform CareCloud Charts received Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) certification ahead of last year's Dec. 31 deadline. In accordance with the requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule, CareCloud Charts' ONC certification means the EHR platform has been approved to provide the necessary functionality that supports seamless and secure access, exchange and use of electronic health information.

CareCloud Charts was tested and certified in December 2022 by Drummond Group LLC, an authorized certification body and the leading certification body for ONC's Health IT Certification Program.CareCloud's other EHR solutions, talkEHR and VertexDR, were certified under the same standards at the beginning of November 2022. All three EHR platforms now include standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) for patient and population services, encryption authentication, and interoperability through certification. To maintain certification, CareCloud's EHR developers must resubmit attestations every six months.

The Cures Act, passed into law in 2016, promotes the free and easy exchange of personal health information between healthcare providers and patients, as long as it does not violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Since then, there have been several provisions to the act, including the integration of the ONC Cures Act Final Rule, which requires APIs, the mechanisms within the EHR systems that allow two software components to easily communicate, and be updated with technology based on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards. This means that different EHR systems can communicate more easily, and that patient data will be more accessible.