ONC's HTI-5 Final Rule Cuts Health IT Certification Criteria
HHS's health IT certification final rule, published October 28, 2026, trims certification requirements and steers interoperability toward FHIR, affecting EHR vendors, health systems and providers' attestations.
On October 28, 2026, HHS's Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology published the Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: ONC Certification Criteria Updates (HTI-5) final rule in the Federal Register. Per a McDermott Will & Emery summary, the rule trims health IT certification requirements and sets a FHIR-forward course for interoperability.
Why it matters: certification criteria decide which EHRs and health IT modules are federally certified, driving vendor roadmaps, health system procurement specifications, and federal programs and attestations tied to certified software. Narrower criteria should reduce compliance cost and speed product releases, while the interoperability direction raises expectations for vendors slow to adopt FHIR-based APIs. Providers need to know whether narrower criteria affect their certified deployments, attestations, and vendor contracts.
Next to watch: effective and compliance dates, ONC implementation materials, and certification bodies' transition of accredited test procedures. Vendors should map criteria changes to product pipelines; providers should review attestations for affected modules. This summary rests on one secondary source and should be checked against the rule text.