Now Available: Updated 2020 CMS QRDA I Schematron and Sample File for Hospital Quality Reporting

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has published an update to the 2020 CMS Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) Category I Schematron and Sample File for Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR). The Schematron provides technical instructions for reporting electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) for the calendar year 2020 reporting period for the:

• Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program
• Medicare and Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Program for Eligible Hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs)

Updates to the 2020 CMS QRDA I Schematron:

• Schematron rules have been added to enforce the use of the current extension attribute within the template element as specified in Implementation Guides (IGs). This change impacts all templates with a version of V2 or greater.
  • If an incorrect extension is used, or if an extension is missing where one is required, QRDA documents will fail validation rules with generation of a conformance error specific to the impacted template

Updates to the 2020 CMS QRDA I Sample File:

• The Medication Order example in the sample file was updated to use the correct extension. It was changed from ‘2017-08-01’ to ‘2018-10-01’.

Additional QRDA-Related Resources:
Additional QRDA-related resources, as well as current and past IGs, are found on the Electronic Clinical Quality Improvement (eCQI) Resource Center QRDA page. For questions related to this guidance, the QRDA IGs or Schematrons, visit the ONC Project Tracking System (Jira) QRDA project.