The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) invites vendors and stakeholders to review and provide feedback on draft electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) specifications 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 electronic health record (EHR) vendors and stakeholders who have the technical capabilities to review the draft measures in the 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 in spring 2022. The draft measures in HTML, XML, and JSON formats are available February 7, 2022 through February 18, 2022, on the (ONC) Project Tracking System eCQM Issue Tracker via the Jira tickets:

• CQM-5135: Annual Update for the 2023 Reporting Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Hospital and Critical Access Hospital eCQMs
• CQM-5136: Annual Update for the 2023 Performance Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Professional and Eligible Clinician eCQMs

The updated eCQMs will be available on the eCQI Resource Center in spring 2022. The eCQMs 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 eCQMs. Refer to the QDM v5.6 Guidance Update 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 2023 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 eCQMs and CQL, visit the eCQI Resource Center.