Our Licensing & Rulemaking teams have spent the past two years working with numerous associations and stakeholders from various licensed facilities as part of our regulatory reform initiative. The last legislative session extended our “exempt” rulemaking authority through April of 2014. This gave us the unique opportunity to live with the new rules for a little while to find out what worked and what didn’t. Our integrated rules officially went into effect on October 1, 2013, but since then, we’ve been continuing to work on incorporating stakeholder and surveyor feedback into the 18 Articles of regulations for Healthcare Institutions and Court Ordered Program Approvals and ensure consistency throughout the packages.

Our teams have been busy going through the comments to develop the new draft Rules, which are now posted online for our final comment period. The drafts and comment surveys will remain up for the next 30 days, giving our team a chance to review and incorporate appropriate feedback before the rules become final in April. We’ll file the final rule packages on April 30, 2014 and have a July 1 implementation date on each of the packages. That’ll give our licensees a chance to learn the new rules and changes before they’re expected to comply with them, and it’ll give our surveyors time to learn the new rules so we can survey to them properly. It’s been a long road- and we’re in the (final) final-stretch now.