Meaningful Use Hardship Exceptions Reopened

CMS has announced its intent to reopen the Meaningful Use Hardship Exceptions filing period and set the new deadline for MU hardship exceptions to November 30, 2014. With the new hardship exception extension, providers can now choose from a number of reasons why they were unable to attest in time. Here’s the details from the CMS announcement:

This reopened hardship exception application submission period is for eligible professionals and eligible hospitals that:
* Have been unable to fully implement 2014 Edition CEHRT due to delays in 2014 Edition
CEHRT availability; AND
* Eligible professionals who were unable to attest by October 1, 2014 and eligible hospitals that were unable to attest by July 1, 2014 using the flexibility options provided in the CMS 2014 CEHRT Flexibility Rule.

These are the only circumstances that will be considered for this reopened hardship exception
application submission period.

This is a big move since the meaningful use hardship exceptions deadline for hospitals was April 1, 2014 and July 1, 2014 for eligible professionals. I imagine there are many organizations that will benefit from this extension. Although, there are probably quite a few organizations that wish they’d known about this exception before now or that think the exceptions are too narrow (ie. they can’t benefit from them).

What are your thoughts on this extension?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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