Formatting and Usage Topics

The Clinical Quality Language Specification (CQL) defines a high-level authoring language designed to be usable by clinical domain experts to express the reasoning aspects of clinical quality artifacts in the quality measurement and decision support domains. The language is a general purpose query language extended with specific functionality to support constructs and functionality common in these domains.

Because of the flexibility and broad applicability of CQL, it necessarily covers a breadth of topics. This guide provides recommendations and guidance to ensure consistent and appropriate use of CQL, especially in the context of expressing clinical quality measures using Quality Data Model (QDM) to represent patient information.

In addition, several of the topics in this guide discuss issues related to the use of CQL within Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) to represent electronic Clinical Quality Measures (eCQMs).