Section 1h: Cross-paradigm/Domain Analysis Models
Section 2: Clinical and Administrative Domains
Section 4: Rules and References

HL7 Cross-Paradigm Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 1

DESCRIPTION

Clinical Quality Language (CQL) is a high-level, domain-specific language focused on clinical quality improvement and targeted at measure and decision support artifact authors and implementers.

In addition, this specification describes a machine-readable canonical representation called Expression Logical Model (ELM) targeted at implementations and designed to enable sharing of clinical knowledge.

See the standard at cql.hl7.org. 

Specification Feedback Comments may be submitted in HL7 Jira Specification Feedback for CQL. 

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

HL7 Cross-Paradigm Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 1 may also go by the following names or acronyms:

"HL7 V3 Standard: Clinical Quality Expression Lanaguage, R1", "Clinical Quality Language", CQL

TARGETS

  • Clinical and Public Health Laboratories
  • Immunization Registries
  • Quality Reporting Agencies
  • Standards Development Organizations (SDOs)
  • Regulatory Agency
  • Payors
  • Pharmaceutical Vendors
  • EHR, PHR Vendors
  • Health Care IT Vendors
  • Clinical Decision Support Systems Vendors
  • Lab Vendors
  • Emergency Services Providers
  • Local and State Departments of Health
  • Medical Imaging Service Providers
  • Healthcare Institutions (hospitals, long term care, home care, mental health)

BENEFITS

  • Creates a “lingua franca” for the exchange of quality knowledge and artifacts. Rather than having an unscalable network of point-to-point communication channels, each with its own set of transformations, different organizations will only need to transform their content to a CQF-compatible format to communicate effectively with any other point in the network of providers that comprises today’s healthcare system. If the models and vocabularies are rich enough, some quality vendors may opt to use CQF as an internal specification in the future.
  • Enables the structuring and encoding of quality content for use as “knowledge artifacts.” These artifacts can be used in support of many areas of the healthcare system, including quality and utilization measurement, disease outbreak detection, comparative effectiveness analysis, evaluation of drug treatment efficacy, monitoring health trends, and other public health, research, and information sharing across the continuum of care. Although the scope of this project focuses on quality knowledge and decision support, potential uses for CQL are not limited to these areas. For example, the CQL grammar can be used to express formal information extraction and transformation rules for converting and deriving data as it is moved from one representation or use to another.

IMPLEMENTATIONS/CASE STUDIES

  • Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT
  • Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
  • Cognitive Medical Systems
  • The MITRE Corporation (Bonnie, Cypress)
  • Telligen (Measure Authoring Tool)
  • Motive Medical Intelligence
  • Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs
  • Avhana Health
  • National Committee for Quality Assurance
  • University of Utah
  • Dynamic Content Group
  • Centers for Disease Control
  • Apervita
  • Cerner

DEVELOPMENT BACKGROUND

Clinical Decision Support and Clinical Quality Measurement are closely related, share many common requirements, and both support improving healthcare quality. However, the standards used for the electronic representation of CDS and CQM artifacts have not been developed in consideration of each other, and the domains use different approaches to the representation of patient data and computable expression logic. This specification focuses on the common representation of expression logic that CQM and CDS-specific artifact standards can then reference.

RELATED DOCUMENTS

HL7 Cross-Paradigm Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 1

TOPICS

  • Clinical Quality
  • Decision Support

BALLOT TYPE

  • Normative

STATUS DATE

2020-12-01

RESPONSIBLE WORK GROUPS

Clinical Decision Support

Implementable Technology Specifications

STAKEHOLDERS

  • Clinical and Public Health Laboratories
  • Clinical Decision Support Systems Vendors
  • EHR, PHR Vendors
  • Emergency Services Providers
  • Health Care IT Vendors
  • Healthcare Institutions
  • Immunization Registries
  • Lab Vendors
  • Local and State Departments of Health
  • Medical Imaging Service Providers
  • Payors
  • Pharmaceutical Vendors
  • Quality Reporting Agencies
  • Regulatory Agency
  • Standards Development Organizations (SDOs)

FAMILY

  • Cross-paradigm

CURRENT STATE

  • Active

REALM

  • Universal