ONC Health IT Certification Deregulation

Current understanding

HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) issued a final rule rolling back or rewriting portions of the federal certification criteria that electronic health record (EHR) software must meet to be ONC-certified, under a ‘deregulatory actions to unleash prosperity’ framing. For health IT vendors and certifying providers, the change reduces mandated feature sets and associated reporting/paperwork obligations; for patients and clinicians, it may alter which interoperability, data-access, and information-blocking functions are guaranteed to be present in certified EHRs. Status: final rule.

Evidence log

• 2026-10-28 — Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: ONC Deregulatory Actions To Unleash Prosperity: cross-connection with patient-device-data-access-act-2025: ONC certification criteria shape what data-access and interoperability features certified EHRs/devices must expose to patients; rolling back criteria interacts with statutory patient device data access proposals. (novelty: 3)

Open questions

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