HL7 Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 2

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.

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

HL7 Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 2 may also go by the following names or acronyms:

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 Telligen
• Motive Medical Intelligence
• Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs
• National Committee for Quality Assurance
• University of Utah
• Smile Digital Health
• Centers for Disease Control
• World Health Organization
• Firely
• Reason Healthcare

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 Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 2

STU DOCUMENTS

HL7 Specification: Clinical Quality Language (CQL), Release 2 See the standard at http://cql.hl7.org/R2.

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TOPICS

• Clinical Quality
• Decision Support
• Public Health

BALLOT TYPE

• STU

STATUS DATE

2026-08-13

RESPONSIBLE WORK GROUP

PRODUCT TYPE

• Document

STAKEHOLDERS

• Clinical and Public Health Laboratories
• Clinical Decision Support Systems Vendors
• EHR, PHR Vendors
• Health Care IT Vendors
• Healthcare Institutions
• HIS Vendors
• Immunization Registries
• Payors
• Quality Reporting Agencies
• Regulatory Agency
• Standards Development Organizations (SDOs)

FAMILY

• Cross-paradigm

CURRENT STATE

• Active

REALM

• Universal