The Five Criteria MIPS Will Still Require After They Stop Existing
ONC's HTI-5 final rule deletes 14 certification criteria, seven of them on January 1. Five of those seven are named by cite in the MIPS CEHRT definition at 42 CFR 414.1305, which has no sunset in it. Hospitals got their conforming fix in August. The clinician version is sitting in a final rule that has not published.
We pulled the Code of Federal Regulations this evening to read one definition. Paragraph (2) of "Certified Electronic Health Record Technology" at 42 CFR 414.1305 is the rule that decides whether a MIPS eligible clinician is using CEHRT at all, and it names certification criteria the way a statute names a section: by cite, with no hedge.
It names five that will not exist in sixty-six days.
"What is a CEHRT definition worth when it points at criteria the Certification Program has stopped issuing?"
ONC's deregulatory final rule went on public inspection Monday at 11:15am and hits the Federal Register tomorrow.
The trade coverage has been about the AI model cards it dropped and the information blocking proposals it punted. Fair enough, those are the loud parts.
The part that reaches your Part B check is quieter, and it is a date.
What Actually Got Cut
Sixty certification criteria were in effect going in, and ONC proposed removing 34 of them and revising seven.
It finalized the removal of 14 and the revision of seven, and left 39 untouched, including every criterion the HTI-4 rule added last year for electronic prior authorization and real-time prescription benefit.
The 14 removals split into two clocks. Seven go the day the rule takes effect, sixty days after tomorrow's publication: clinical decision support, both security tag criteria, care plan, consolidated CDA creation performance, and the two Direct Project transport criteria.
The other seven go on January 1, 2027, by amendatory instruction 12: family health history at §170.315(a)(12), the clinical quality measure filter at (c)(4), patient health information capture at (e)(3), automated numerator recording at (g)(1), automated measure calculation at (g)(2), and the two application access criteria at (g)(7) and (g)(9).
Read that January list against the CEHRT paragraph above and five of the seven are the same criteria (chart below).
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