CQL is a Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) authoring language standard designed to be both human readable and machine-processable. It is part of the harmonization effort to align specification development for quality measures, including electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs), digital quality measures (dQMs), and clinical decision support (CDS) artifacts.
CQL enables authors to express logic in a clear readable format that is also structured sufficiently for automated processing. It allows for a more modular, flexible, and robust expression of the logic and sharing of logic between measures and clinical decision support. CQL also serves as the expression logic used in Health Quality Measure Format and Quality Measure Implementation Guide for which describes an approach for representing quality measures.
Measure authors with access to the Measure Authoring Development Integrated Environment (MADiE) can use the tool to author measures using CQL. Visit the MADiE webpage for more information.