The ACC will offer licensing terms to any CDS vendor agreeing to meet the standardized terms of the ACC's AUC licensing agreement. ACC currently has licensing agreements with a number of CDSM partners. Several additional licensing agreements are in negotiations.

All vendors must sign a Licensing Vendor Agreement. Click here to download. For more information about becoming a vendor, email mmoran@acc.org.

The College's licensing program was designed to create and maintain standards for implementation across all CDS licensees while allowing the market to innovate in how the content is integrated and delivered to end users.

CDS is designed to match your clinical rationale and documentation for ordering. It generally requires standardizing what you already have provided for billing documentation. The total interaction is designed to be between 30 and 90 seconds. Practices and hospitals will likely chose between implementing this documentation at the time of order by the provider or at the time of scheduling the test with back office staff.

The documentation for Medicare billing is still to be determined, although the legislation requires that the CDS vendor, AUC score, clinical indication, procedure and decision support number all be communicated as a part of the required documentation along with provider NPI numbers. The goal is for CDS vendors to work with CMS to facilitate this documentation process, including verifying CDS was used prior to scheduling a patient for a test.