Health Quality Measure Format (HQMF) is a standards-based representation of quality measures as electronic documents written in XML. Health Level Seven International® (HL7®), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards development organization developed and maintains HQMF. An eCQM specification created using the CQL-based HQMF Implementation Guide provides measure details identifying and classifying the measure and provides important metadata about the measure. HQMF defines measure metadata and population structure. The metadata defined in the HQMF document header include descriptions of the measure populations, any stratifications, the measure steward, measure type, identifiers, rationale, scoring, references to articles, definitions of value sets and/or direct reference codes referenced in the body of the measure, and other details. The population structure contains a Population Criteria section and a Data Criteria section. The Population Criteria section defines the measure populations (e.g., denominator, numerator, exclusions, measure observation) and assigns their identifiers. The Data Criteria section defines the patient data of interest in the measure as a set of entries. Each entry identifies specific types of data along with constraints that the data must meet.
Find the CQL-based HQMF standard and Implementation Guide
The latest version of the CQL-based HQMF standard was published in March 2021. Download the latest version: CQL-based HQMF IG, STU 4.1.