Dynamic Health IT - Quality Measure and Interoperability Solutions

DHIT participated in the HL7 Digital Quality Summit November 1^st and 2^nd in Washington, DC.  The event was jointly hosted by HL7 and NCQA and provided a unique opportunity to discuss overlapping issues between quality tracking and interoperability.  The interactive sessions were an excellent forum for peer networking, discussing challenges and showing off the latest solutions. 

The hot discussion topic at the meeting was the CMS announcement that starting with the 2019 reporting period, eCQMs would be transitioned from the current HQMF XML modeling language to the new Clinical Quality Language (CQL) standard.  CQL gives quality measure authors much more power and flexibility in creating precise definitions of quality measures that are human readable yet structured enough for processing a query electronically.  CQL replaces the logic expressions currently defined in the Quality Data Model (QDM). Going forward, QDM will include only the conceptual model for defining data elements (the data model).