Most days I typically have my nose buried in either the Meaningful Use or Standards and Certification Criteria final rules (in a majority of cases both) searching for answers to questions I’ve received. Finding the right place quickly often proves to be the most difficult challenge. This led me to look for a way to more efficiently find the relevant parts of the rules. With the help of some of my staff, we developed quick reference grids to accomplish this goal.

Now that I’ve field tested these grids (I primarily use the combined grid), I thought others might find them just as useful. The grids capture, in one place, the meaningful use objectives, measures, and exclusions, and the correlated certification criteria and standards. They also reference the relevant preamble page ranges associated with each requirement from both of the respective rules.

Each grid follows the same format:

• The first main column references meaningful use objectives and measures and serves as the anchor around which the rest of the grid is organized. The core set objectives and measures are listed first followed by the menu set objectives and measures.
• The second column references the certification criteria that correlate with each meaningful use objective and measure. Note, the combined version includes colored text for two purposes: 1) to identify certification criteria that are specific to either ambulatory (blue) or inpatient (red) settings; and 2) to call out wording nuances that are unique to an ambulatory or inpatient specific certification criterion where we have combined the ambulatory and inpatient certification criteria to save space. Where black text is used, the certification criterion is the same for both settings.
• The third column identifies the standard(s) and implementation specifications referred to by each certification criterion, where applicable.

Select here to download the combined grid [PDF – 364 KB]: Includes EP/EH&CAH objectives and measures as well as the standards and certification criteria for both ambulatory and inpatient settings.

Select here to download the EP/ambulatory setting only grid [PDF – 311 KB]: Includes only the EP objectives and measures and the standards and certification criteria for the ambulatory setting.

Select here to download the EH&CAH/inpatient setting only grid [PDF – 309 KB]: Includes only the EH&CAH objectives and measures and the standards and certification criteria for the inpatient setting.

Please note that these are unofficial recitations of only a portion of the regulations. The official version of all federal regulations is published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Additionally, while we have done our best to make sure there are no typos, if you happen to identify one (that doesn’t already exist in the rules) please let us know by shooting an e-mail to onc.request@hhs.gov with “quick reference grids” in the subject line and enough detail for us to find and correct the typo. If we create a second version, we’re considering adding links to applicable FAQs. Feel free to leave a comment below if you think that would be helpful.

Finally, thanks to Jennifer Frazier and Mike Lipinski on my team for the hard work on these.

View Section 508 compliant versions of resources in this blog post:

• EP/EH&CAH objectives and measures grid [PDF – 547 KB]
• EP/ambulatory setting only grid [PDF – 462 KB]
• EH&CAH/inpatient setting only grid [PDF – 477 KB]