BREAKING: CMS Quietly Reopens MU Hardship Exception Period

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is reopening the period in which eligible professionals (EPs) and eligible hospitals (EHs) can apply for a meaningful use hardship exception, a week after announcing that 44,000 EPs and EHs have already applied for one.

The new deadline is Nov. 30, 2014. The original deadline was April 1, 2014 for EHs and July 1, 2014 for EPs. In a message on the CMS site, the agency says the reopened period is for EPs and EHs that haven’t been able to fully implement 2014 Edition certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT) due to delay in availability and EPs who were unable to attest by Oct. 1, 2014 and EHs unable to attest by July 1, 2014 using the flexibility options recently finalized by the CMS.

Last week, a CMS spokesperson told HCI that the majority of exemption requests are coming from first-time attestations that are experiencing issues with their 2014 certified electronic health record technology (CEHRT).

CMS announced the reopening of the hardship exception submission period quietly through Twitter. The application itself can be found here. At the same time, CMS announced that $16.2 billion in Medicare EHR Incentive Program payments and $8.5 billion in Medicaid EHR Incentive Program have been paid out through August of this year.