CMS quality programs will require the use of a new health IT standard, called Clinical Quality Language (CQL), in the 2019 care year to “better express logic defining measure populations to improve the accuracy and clarity” of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs).

CQL is a Health Level Seven (HL&) standard which “aims to unify the expression of logic for eCQMS and clinical decision support” domains, CMS said. The transition will begin with the 2019 reporting period for eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs) and the 2019 performance for professionals and clinicians, affecting programs like:

• Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program
• Medicare Electronic Health Record Incentive Program
• Quality Payment Program, including Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models

CMS expects to publish CQL-based quality measures in spring 2018. Draft eCQM specifications are available until Nov. 13 for hospitals and clinicians, but those are for informational review only and can change before performance or reporting for CMS programs in 2019.

“Measures expressed using CQL logic will continue to use the Quality Data Model (QDM) as the conceptual model to express clinical concepts contained within quality measures,” CMS said. “Refer to the QDM v5.3 annotated version and current version of the CQL standard to better understand how they work together to provide eCQMs that are human readable, yet structured for electronic processing.”