Open-source Work Aims To Align CQM, CDS

Providers and hospitals pursuing EHR incentives know about clinical quality measures (CQMs) and clinical decision support (CDS) in terms of reporting measures required under Stage 2 of meaningful use. What they may be aware of is that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is working to create standards that would align those two realms of modern medicine.

"Clinical quality measurement and clinical decision support are really two parts of the same point," explained Marc Hadley, principal software systems engineer at MITRE Corporation and a co-presenter at a HIMSS14 educational session on Tuesday. Hadley developed an open-source quality measure engine that uses an algorithm to compute CQMs and is designed to scale to large populations of patients.

"We take personal health information and activate it into practices and populations, where we can perform public health and clinical research," said Hadley. "That can provide clinical guidelines that drive public health policy and influence the creation of clinical quality measures and clinical decision support rules, which in turn help providers deliver care."