The RUAIH timeline — dates that are actually published

What is published

• September 2025 — The Joint Commission and the Coalition for Health AI publish joint guidance on the responsible use of AI in healthcare: seven elements that become the certification’s intellectual foundation.
• 28 May 2026 — CHAI releases its eight governance playbooks, the operational elaboration of that guidance.
• 1 June 2026 — The Joint Commission announces the RUAIH certification programme, naming five standards areas.

What is not published

A freely public standards manual, fee schedule, and published survey calendar. The Joint Commission’s programme page describes eligibility “under the standards in this manual”, and organisations are plainly being reviewed against it — Hackensack Meridian Health earned the first certification on 29 July 2026 (HMH announcement, 29 July 2026) — but the manual itself is obtained through the Joint Commission’s certification process rather than published for general download. Every timeline you see beyond the three dates above is projection.

The clock that matters is not on this list

The timeline question people mean to ask is “when do I need to start?” — and the answer does not depend on unpublished dates. It depends on the observation that certification evidence splits into two kinds. Drafted evidence (charters, policies, procedures) takes days and can wait. Accumulated evidence — quarterly performance attestations against a locked baseline, training completion records, a run of governance-committee minutes — takes exactly as long as it takes, and no consultant can compress it after the fact.

An organisation that wants twelve months of monitoring history on its highest-risk models at survey time needs to have started twelve months before its survey. Since your survey date is set by when you apply, the only way to be early is to be early. How to prepare orders the work by exactly this logic.