ONC, CMS Delay Compliance Dates for EHR Interoperability

The COVID-19 pandemic has incurred a number of regulatory casualties in recent weeks, and the final rules for electronic health records (EHRs) promulgated earlier this year are two of the latest among those. Not all aspects of these rules were on the same original compliance deadline, however, and vendors will have to delve into the details of these respective delays to keep them straight.

The Office of the National Coordinator and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services posted a joint statement about the delayed implementation date. ONC director Don Rucker said his agency will offer three months of enforcement discretion to EHR vendors “at the end of … certain compliance dates,” a concession to the pandemic. In contrast, CMS administrator Seema Verma stated that hospitals will generally have an additional six months to implement the related requirements.

The ONC announcement was accompanied by a tabular presentation of revised compliance deadlines, many of which simply add three months onto the original six-month deadline. The roll-out of application programming interface (API) functionality was originally subject to a 24-month compliance date, but now enjoys 27 months of regulatory relief. Many other requirements, such as the information blocking requirement, were initially on a six-month delay from the date of the final rule, but this requirement will not be in force until the end of the year at the earliest. The ONC rule appears in the Federal Register with a date stamp of May 1 and an effective date of June 30.

The CMS stated that the requirements for the patient access API are now in force as of Jan. 1, 2021, the same date as the provider directory API. The CMS requirement for information blocking enjoys a less crisply defined compliance date of “late 2020,” while payer-to-payer data exchange functions must be up and running by Jan. 1, 2022.

FDA Posts AE Reporting Policy

Among the pandemic-related considerations undertaken by the FDA is a policy document spelling out the agency’s expectations regarding adverse event (AE) reporting. The terms of the policy apply to medical products and dietary supplements, and deals with the prospect that COVID-driven absenteeism might hamper a company’s AE reporting program.

The policy, which updates a 2012 guidance addressing influenza outbreaks, allows companies to focus their AE reporting efforts on products related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected companies are expected to develop a continuity of operations plan (COOP), which should spell out AE reporting and updates for any events that are stored during the pandemic. Companies should document the start and ending dates of their nations’ emergency declarations as well as the impact of absenteeism on AE reporting.

The FDA says it “does not plan to object” if a company is unable to file AE reports on time due to absenteeism caused by they pandemic, but the affect entities have to file those reports within six months of restoration of normal order of a company’s operations. Companies that can report at least some AEs in a timely fashion must do so, and firms that can file all required reports are expected to make timely reports. If the agency expresses concern about reports in connection with specific products or a particular set of circumstances, the FDA will offer no leniency on the standard reporting requirements, the guidance states.