ONC's HTI-5 Final Rule Drops 14 Health IT Certification Criteria
ONC's HTI-5 final rule, published October 28, 2026, removes 14 criteria from the Health IT Certification Program, reshaping compliance and product roadmaps for health IT vendors, providers and payers.
On October 28, 2026, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology published the HTI-5 final rule, scaling back the ONC Health IT Certification Program by removing 14 certification criteria and revising other parts of the framework. The available excerpt does not identify which criteria were removed or the revised provisions, so affected obligations must be confirmed against the rule text.
Why sophisticated counsel should care: certified health IT sits at the intersection of federal and state incentive programs, hospital and payer procurement, and vendor development cycles. A narrower criteria set can shorten conformance testing and release timelines for EHR and digital health vendors, while changing which attestations providers must make and which marketing claims remain supportable. It also matters for clients whose business models assume that a given certification status is durable.
Concrete next steps: map affected criteria against client product and certification plans; review state-law, payer-contract and grant overlays that may preserve stricter requirements than the federal baseline; and track effective and compliance dates, including any post-publication corrections or implementation guidance.