It's official: Meaningful use hardship exception gets new deadline for submission

Following up to a story we first reported last week: Providers will be able to file a heardship exception for the meaningful use program until March 15, 2016, after President Barack Obama signed the Patient Access and Medicare Protection Act (S.2425) into law.

 

The deadline, which will allow CMS to review submissions by "categories of eligible professionals," should be welcome news to providers who face a potential 2% pay cut in 2017 based on their meaningful use reporting for calendar year 2015. However, the exact details of the revised submission guidelines -- including the thousand-dollar question of how the law will open up the door for eased hardship-exception access -- remain unclear.

 

At the time when the legislation awaited Obama's signature, a CMS spokesperson confirmed to Part B News that intrinsic details of S.2425 had yet to be ironed out. "None of this is finalized yet," the spokesperson said at the time.