On December 7, 2012, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published an interim final rule with comment period to make revisions to the 2014 Edition Electronic Health Record (EHR) and revisions to the EHR Incentive Program.  Specifically, this rule will:

• Replace the Data Element Catalog (DEC) standard and the Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) Category III standard adopted in the final rule published on September 4, 2012 with updated versions of those standards.
• Revise the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs by adding an alternative measure for the Stage 2 meaningful use (MU) objective for hospitals to provide structured electronic laboratory results to ambulatory providers, correcting the regulation text for the measures associated with the objective for hospitals to provide patients the ability to view online, download, and transmit information about a hospital admission, and making the case number threshold exemption for clinical quality measure (CQM) reporting applicable for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) beginning with FY 2013.
• Provide notice of CMS’s intention to issue technical corrections to the electronic specifications for CQMs released on October 25, 2012.

This interim final rule will be effective January 5, 2012.