The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) invites vendors and stakeholders to review and provide feedback on draft electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) packages that include logic and header changes for eCQMs under consideration for CMS quality reporting and payment programs.

This opportunity will allow CMS to learn from EHR vendors who have the technical capabilities to review the draft measures in the new Clinical Quality Language (CQL) standard for logic expression and test the Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) code by directly consuming machine readable XML files for eCQMs. Testing will help CMS to identify instances in which the XML code produces errors so that issues can be resolved prior to posting the fully specified measures this spring. The draft measures in HTML, XML, and JSON formats are available February 28, 2018 through March 20, 2018, on the CQM Issue Tracker via the following tickets:

• Draft eligible hospital and critical access hospital measures (CQM-2972)

• Draft eligible professional and eligible clinician measures (CQM-2971)

Updating eCQMs for 2019 Reporting

CMS is updating Eligible Hospital and Eligible Professional/Eligible Clinician eCQMs for potential inclusion in the following programs:

The Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program (IQR);

The Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs for eligible hospitals, critical access hospitals and eligible professionals; and

The Quality Payment Program (QPP): The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Alternative Payment Models (APMs).

The updated eCQMs will be available on the eCQI Resource Center in Spring 2018. The measures will be expressed using CQL logic and will continue to use the Quality Data Model (QDM) as the conceptual model to express clinical concepts contained within quality measures. 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. Measures will not be eligible for 2019 reporting unless and until they are proposed and finalized through notice-and-comment rulemaking for each applicable program.

For More Information

To find out more about electronic clinical quality measures and CQL, visit the eCQI Resource Center.