CQL is a Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) authoring language standard that is intended to be human readable. It is part of the harmonization effort to align specification development for quality measures, including electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) and clinical decision support (CDS) artifacts. CQL provides the ability to express human-readable logic structured sufficiently for processing a query electronically. CQL is the expression logic used in Health Quality Measure Format (HQMF). Measure authors with access to the Measure Authoring Development Integrated Envirnoment (MADiE) can use the tool to author measures using CQL. Visit the MADiE webpage for more information.
CQL allows for a more modular, flexible, and robust expression of the logic. It allows sharing of logic between measures and clinical decision support.