Cypress is the open source, rigorous and repeatable testing tool of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and EHR modules in calculating eCQMs used by CMS’s Promoting Interoperability programs. It is available for use or adoption by the health IT community including EHR vendors and Authorized Testing Labs.

Cypress serves as the official testing tool for the 2015 EHR Certification program supported by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

For more information, visit the Project Cypress site.

Cypress tests four different certification criteria:

• Record and Export - Record clinical data and export it in a format usable by other EHRs
• Import and Calculate - Import data from other EHRs and perform CQM calculations
• Report - Create standard data files that can be electronically submitted to quality reporting programs
• Data Filter - Filter clinical data based on patient and provider data

Testing may be performed manually or through an API (see the Cypress API documentation included in source for more information).

The Cypress software includes a standard test data of synthetic patient records that exercises all of the CQMs, for Eligible Clinicians (EC) and Eligible Hospitals (EH).

Testers download patient data from Cypress, manipulate it with the EHR technology, and upload the results to Cypress for validation. Cypress then provides a report of any errors detected in the uploaded results.

Usage of Cypress requires a UMLS account in order to sign into the Cypress Demo Server or download the CQMs.