HETS attestation deadline is May 11 — and there is no grace period

If your agency runs Medicare eligibility checks through any clearinghouse — Stedi, Availity, Waystar, or another — May 11 is the date you need to be aware of. After that, any 270 eligibility request tied to an NPI without an active HETS Trading Partner attestation will be rejected by CMS. There's no grace period and no retry window.

What CMS actually requires

The HETS (HIPAA Eligibility Transaction System) Trading Partner Agreement has been around for years, but enforcement of the attestation step was deferred multiple times. The January 8, 2026 urgent notification ended the deferrals: every entity sending 270 transactions to HETS — including agencies, clearinghouses, and the integration layer between them — must have a current, signed attestation on file by May 11.

Specifically the attestation captures the signer's name, title, IP, timestamp, and the exact agreement text and version. CMS treats it as an immutable trading partner record. If you've never explicitly attested, you're not attested.

Who needs to act

Anyone who hits the HETS endpoint, directly or via a downstream service. Practically that means:

• Agencies that send 270/271 directly — your tax ID and submitter ID need an attestation.
• Agencies using a clearinghouse — your clearinghouse needs an attestation, and so does your NPI as a delegated provider. Two records.
• Agencies with multiple NPIs — one per NPI. Multi-branch organizations are most exposed because each branch operates under its own NPI.

If you can't tell whether your clearinghouse has filed for you, ask in writing today. "We assume so" is not a defensible answer to your DON when the eligibility queue stops working on May 12.

What happens if you miss it

Eligibility checks stop returning. That cascades into intake (you can't verify Medicare coverage on a new admission), billing (you can't confirm coverage before submitting the claim), and prior authorization workflows for Medicare Advantage that share the 270/271 pipe.

The downstream effect: claims sit in your billing hold queue waiting for "missing eligibility verification" — which now never resolves automatically. Your AR aging gets worse without anyone noticing for a week or two, until the next monthly review.

What we built for this

Carelytic's HETS attestation flow lives at Settings → Compliance → HETS Attestation. Signing in the platform writes the immutable audit trail CMS expects, captures the version of the agreement text, and ties the attestation to your tenant's NPI registry. Most platforms send agencies to hets.cms.gov and tell them to come back when they're done — we keep it in-product so your CSM can confirm the record exists before the deadline.

Action items for this week

1. Confirm in writing whether your clearinghouse has filed HETS attestation under your trading partner ID.
2. For each NPI your agency operates under, confirm a separate provider-level attestation has been filed.
3. Set a Carelytic (or your platform's) eligibility test on May 12 — a single 270 against a known active Medicare patient. Confirm the 271 returns.
4. If you don't get a 271 response on May 12, escalate through your clearinghouse support channel; do not wait for the monthly AR review to discover it.