Acceptance Criteria

Hello,

I’m currently taking a few IT classes for my bachelor’s degree, and one of my assignments for this week is to detail implementation and acceptance criteria for a project. (The project my team is working on requires us to implement an electronic medical record system for a hospital.)

My question is, what exactly is acceptance criteria? Is it something used to gauge user acceptance of any and all implemented hardware/software? Or perhaps a set of goals that need to be met in order for users to accept the new changes to their IT environment?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!