The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) invites electronic health record (EHR) vendors and interested parties to review and provide feedback on draft electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) specifications, including draft logic and header changes, under consideration for CMS quality reporting and payment programs.

This opportunity will allow CMS to learn from EHR vendors and interested parties who have the technical ability 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 2025. 

The draft measures in HTML, XML, and JSON formats are available December 6, 2024 through December 20, 2024 on the ONC Project Tracking System eCQM Issue Tracker via the following Jira tickets: 

• CQM-7459: Annual Update for the 2026 Performance Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Clinician eCQMs
• CQM-7460: Annual Update for the 2026 Reporting Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Hospital and Critical Access Hospital eCQMs
• CQM-7461: Annual Update for the 2026 Reporting Period: Draft Preview of Outpatient Quality Reporting eCQMs

Please note that the draft eCQM specifications posted during this review period are exported through the Measure Authoring Development Integrated Environment (MADiE) tool. Naming conventions used in draft eCQM specification files may differ from those used in previously published measures exported through the now decommissioned Measure Authoring Tool (MAT).

The  fully specified eCQMs will be available on the eCQI Resource Center in spring 2025. Measures will not be eligible for 2026 reporting unless and until they are proposed and finalized through notice-and-comment rulemaking for each applicable program. 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 and CQL standard v1.5.2 to better understand how they work together to provide eCQMs that are human readable, yet structured for electronic processing.

For More Information

To find out more about eCQMs and CQL, visit the eCQI Resource Center.