DQIC Guidelines for Inclusion
Overview
The Digital Quality Implementers Community is a group of leading experts in the health care sector focused on advancing the Clinical Quality Language, a domain-specific language that supports clinical quality measurement, clinical decision and cognitive support, computable guidelines, and public health reporting.
Membership
Members of the DQIC community are those that have CQL engines or are actively planning to build or support CQL engines.
What is a “CQL Engine”?
A “CQL engine” can be defined as any software component that executes and processes Clinical Quality Language specifications. Since the Clinical Quality Language specification and the execution software are open-source, it’s expected that both vendors as well as users of CQL engines may discover inconsistencies, missing test specifications, or new features that may be needed to support emerging use cases. Consequently, the DQIC is open to both vendors and users of vendor tools who are considering extensions using CQL to ensure that consistency in results can be maintained.
Why is DQIC Critical for the Success of CQL and Health Care Quality?
Historically, quality measurement language itself has been open for interpretation. Those that have built clinical quality measurement definitions have used the English language to describe the measurements; however, the technology vendors use leverage various underlying languages (Java, JavaScript, .Net, SQL, Python, etc.) to calculate the measures. This has caused some errors and discrepancies due to the disconnect. By ensuring that the specifications as well as all unit tests, guidance, and examples are developed, shared, and coordinated, users of the software executing CQL will have confidence. This also enables choice and avoids vendor lock-in (for end users of CQL engines) but preserves the ability to build value-add features on top of the base CQL specification (for CQL engine developers).
Is the DQIC part of HL7®?
No. While all executive steering community members of DQIC are active members of HL7® and any changes to the CQL specification are done according to HL7® processes, the community operates only on the Apache 2.0 license, enabling more agility to make changes to the software, test cases, guidance, examples, and training beyond the scope of HL7® for implementation.