NCQA’s New eMeasure Certification Program
July 21, 2015 · NCQA
You’ll recall our blog about NCQA’s Learning Collaborative effort, and that we’re recruiting health plans, vendors and Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) to explore innovative ways of reporting quality measures that use data from electronic clinical data systems.
Now we want to tell you about another NCQA program that works with vendors that design and sell software that calculates electronic clinical quality measures (eCQM): eMeasure Certification.
Claims data, laboratory results and pharmaceutical data have always been the primary sources of information for measuring health care quality. As technology has developed, electronic health records (EHR) present a new, source of detailed information that can also be used to report health care performance.
In response to these advances, NCQA designed and tested a new eMeasure Certification program to certify the data extraction and reporting process these systems provide. This new program is designed for organizations that develop quality-measure reporting software to calculate eCQMs using EHR data.
Organizations relying on these systems and software will want to make sure the data they get are accurate and appropriately organized. The software code that produces the eCQM results will be tested to determine if it can identify EHR data that meet eCQM specifications and if organizations using the software—providers, ACOs and others—can report results to health plans in the standard format (Quality Reporting Document Architecture [QRDA]).
NCQA’s eMeasure Certification will provide reassurance that the software is correctly collecting, organizing and presenting data used for performance measurement reporting programs (like NCQA’s HEDIS measures and CMS Medicare Stars).
The use of EHR-generated data opens the door to new, expansive resources for measuring performance and improving quality. That’s why it’s so important to make sure we get the data extraction and exchange just right—from provider, to plan, to performance measurement programs. The eMeasure Certification program does exactly that.
To learn more about the program and how to become a certified eMeasure Certification vendor, please visit the eMeasure Certification webpage.
