Extending CQL with openEHR to Express Clinical Quality Indicators.

Clinical Quality Language (CQL), a HL7 authoring language to express clinical quality indicators, provides the capability to express logic that is human readable yet structured enough for processing a query electronically. OpenEHR is a widely used, modeling methodology, but currently CQL cannot support openEHR archetypes which hinders its usage in openEHR environment. This paper presents a method to express and compute clinical quality indicators by extending CQL with openEHR archetypes. To verb the feasibility of this method, 64 indicators from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and 118 indicators from local environment in China were utilized. The results show that those indicators can be well represented and computed in openEHR environment.