Health Level 7

Health Level 7: Clinical Quality Language

Health Level 7 (HL7) is a set of international standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. One of the key components of HL7 is the Clinical Quality Language (CQL), which is a domain-specific language designed to express logic that is human-readable yet structured enough to be processed by computers.

Overview

CQL is used to define clinical quality measures and decision support rules. It provides a way to express the criteria for quality measures and clinical decision support in a way that is both understandable to clinicians and executable by health information technology systems. CQL is part of the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, which aims to facilitate the exchange of healthcare information electronically.

Features

• **Human-Readable Syntax**: CQL is designed to be readable by clinicians, making it easier for them to understand and validate the logic.
• **Interoperability**: CQL supports interoperability by providing a standard way to express clinical logic that can be shared across different health IT systems.
• **Reusability**: The logic defined in CQL can be reused across different measures and decision support rules, reducing redundancy and improving consistency.

Applications

CQL is used in various applications within the healthcare industry, including:

• **Clinical Decision Support (CDS)**: CQL can be used to define rules that provide clinicians with patient-specific assessments or recommendations to aid clinical decision-making.
• **Quality Measurement**: CQL is used to define the criteria for clinical quality measures, which are used to assess the performance of healthcare providers.

Related Standards

CQL is part of a broader ecosystem of standards and specifications developed by HL7, including:

• FHIR
• HL7 Version 2
• HL7 Version 3
• Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

See Also

• Electronic Health Record (EHR)
• Health Information Exchange (HIE)
• Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS)
• Quality Measures
• Interoperability

Related Pages

• Health Level 7
• Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources
• Clinical Decision Support System
• Quality Measures
• Interoperability