As the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services mandates use of Clinical Quality Language, cloud platform company Apervita to be the first provider of CQL execution services for all healthcare enterprises
Compared to previous translation and implementation methods, CQL on Apervita more efficient- 90% reduction in time and resources
CHICAGO, October 11, 2018–Healthcare cloud platform company Apervita, Inc. today announced it’s the first platform to provide Clinical Quality Language (CQL) execution to all healthcare enterprises via a subscription service. CQL-based measures are the new mandated standard from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for 2019 electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) reporting for eligible hospitals and providers, underpinning a new generation of care pathways and clinical decision support (CDS). The language is designed specifically to express healthcare logic that can be readily interpreted by a computer, accelerating the translation of healthcare knowledge into clinical practice.
“The healthcare industry has been pursuing the goal of shareable computable knowledge for decades,” said Apervita Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer, Blackford Middleton, M.D. “CQL on Apervita has finally achieved that goal. The broad adoption of CQL saves enormous amounts of time and money, and when executed on Apervita, gives clinicians unprecedented access to the most up-to-date evidence delivered at the point of care.”
The challenge for most organizations is that they can’t readily execute CQL-based measures and CDS on their own. Apervita’s CQL-as-a-Service allows providers, payers, accreditation and quality bodies to quickly use CQL, giving them an all-in-one mechanism to more easily create, execute and exchange measures, clinical pathways, CDS and more.
The language is being adopted and endorsed by some of the leading healthcare governing bodies in the world, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Committee for Quality Assurance and Health Level Seven International.
“The healthcare industry has been looking for effective ways to implement quality measures and clinical decision support that reduce unwarranted variation and improve clinical performance at scale,” said Michael Barr, M.D., Executive Vice President for Quality Measurement and Research Group at the National Committee for Quality Assurance. “CQL provides a standards-based approach for measures and decision support specification that can lead to more clinically relevant measures and, with other standards such as FHIR, should reduce the burden of measure implementation, management and reporting.”
Prior to CQL, a developer was required to manually translate healthcare measures, pathways or CDS, creating healthcare analytics unique to each organization and technology. This locked them into a custom implementation and caused substantial variability between healthcare organizations.
Compared to previous translation and implementation methods, CQL-as-a-Service on Apervita is more efficient, reducing time and resources by 90 percent. The platform can also substantially reduce clinical variability, allowing for accurate and easily shareable benchmarking, further allowing users to rapidly build and deploy CQL applications and integrate them with their existing architecture, which would otherwise be difficult and costly.
“CQL is a groundbreaking development for the industry,” said Bryn Rhodes, CTO for HarmonIT Health Systems Corporation and a key leader in developing the language. “It brings the power of modern computing and the clinician together like never before. When implemented on a cloud platform it can enable the rapid development, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge for eCQMs, ePathways and CDS.”
Visit apervita.com/cql for more information and register for the Healthcare Informatics and Apervita webinar on CQL here.
About Apervita:
Apervita, Inc. is the first healthcare platform-as-a-service company that allows providers, payers and the health enterprises that support them to easily build and share applications that decrease cost, improve patient and clinician experience, and improve outcomes. With Apervita, health enterprises can collaborate freely within and outside of their organizations, streamlining and standardizing measures reporting and delivering insights at the point of care with ePathways.
Apervita is used by more than 1,000 hospitals, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and The University of Michigan. Additional partners include The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The Joint Commission.
About NCQA
NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations. It also recognizes clinicians and practices in key areas of performance. NCQA’s Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA’s Web site (ncqa.org) contains information to help consumers, employers and others make more informed health care choices. NCQA can be found online at ncqa.org, on Twitter @ncqa, on Facebook at facebook.com/NCQA.org/, and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/ncqa.