Quality Improvement

About the Quality Improvement HL7 FHIR Accelerator

The HL7 Quality Improvement Accelerator is currently being formed and is seeking founding members. It will bring together experts in clinical quality measurement, clinical decision support, and computable guideline development to address shared challenges across these areas, with the goal of creating measures, guidelines, and decision support tools that are easier to develop, easier to implement, and more effective at improving healthcare processes and patient outcomes.

Purpose

The HL7 Quality Improvement Accelerator is a collaborative program that advances the standards-based development and implementation of Clinical Quality Language (CQL) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) artifacts for clinical quality measurement, clinical decision support (CDS), and computable clinical guidelines.

By bringing together HL7 work groups, government agencies, clinical societies, software vendors, implementers, and other stakeholders, the Accelerator develops practical guidance, promotes interoperable and reusable standards-based artifacts, and helps reduce implementation burden. Its goal is to make quality measures, clinical guidelines, and decision support easier to build, implement, and maintain, ultimately improving healthcare processes and patient outcomes.

The Accelerator's Role in the Quality Ecosystem

The Accelerator strengthens the national quality measurement ecosystem by providing shared infrastructure, governance, and standards alignment across key stakeholders. Its core functions include:

Formalizing collaboration across the quality measurement ecosystem, bringing together measure authors, regulators, payers, providers, and vendors to coordinate priorities, reduce fragmentation, and accelerate innovation.
Standardizing the data elements used in quality measures (without harmonizing the measures themselves), ensuring consistent, reusable, and interoperable data definitions across programs and implementers.
Building shared technical infrastructure—including DEQM, CQL, and FHIR based measure authoring tools—to support scalable, standards based digital quality measurement.
Providing a governance structure that enables coordinated decision making among CMS, NCQA, Joint Commission, CDC, VA, and other national stakeholders, ensuring alignment on strategy, implementation, and future state innovation.

Objectives

Develop and maintain standards based CQL and FHIR guidance for agencies, clinical societies, and software vendors to ensure high fidelity interoperability, demonstrated through robust, reusable, and consistent execution across diverse environments.
Create and sustain compatibility testing frameworks, tools, and criteria that enable runtime execution engines to reliably support broad use cases and maximize reuse of CDS and dQM libraries.
Promote interoperable reuse of common CQL and FHIR assets by establishing standardized, shared publication pathways and adoption mechanisms.
Demonstrate measurable improvements in quality outcomes through the development of high quality measures and supporting artifacts such as decision support, user education, and evidence resources.
Define, shape, and deploy forward looking approaches to quality measurement, providing guidance for innovative, future state methodologies and implementation models.

Target members

Key organizational members ideally include:

Federal health agencies
Clinical societies, guideline developers, policy makers, systematic reviewers
Software vendors and systems integrators
Research and publisher organizations
Healthcare delivery organizations
Payers

Learn More

For more information about the Quality Improvement FHIR Accelerator, visit our Confluence page: https://confluence.hl7.org/spaces/QFA/pages/175617050/Quality+Improvement+Accelerator+Future+Home