On Thursday, October 30, 2014, CMS conducted a teleconference, CMS 2014 CEHRT Flexibility Rule. The primary purpose of the call was to review the CEHRT flexibility rule we discussed in September and address the reopening of the period for some providers to file hardship requests.

Two announcements of relevance were made during the call:

The CMS website is accepting Meaningful Use / MIPS attestations for providers who have used the flexibility options. Before this upgrade, only providers not using flexibility options could attest.

CMS also announced a new limited exception for the subset of providers who could not meet the threshold for the Stage 2 summary of care measure in FY 2014 because the recipients of the transitions or referrals were impacted by 2014 Edition CEHRT availability delays. If a sufficient number of receiving providers are not available, the referring provider must retain documentation that clearly demonstrates that they were unable to meet the 10 percent threshold for the measure to provide an electronic summary of care document because of recipients availability. A referring provider under this circumstance may choose to attest to the 2014 Stage 1 objectives and measures for the EHR reporting period in 2014 instead.

More details can be found in the presentation slides and a transcript will be posted in approximately two weeks.

If you want more information about what the Flex IT Act means for you, read our latest post on the topic.