QRDA--technology overview and lessons learned

Quality of healthcare is a high priority for several years but there was no standard until recently. The standards body, HL7 released draft standard for Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) with an aim to develop an electronic data standard for healthcare information systems to use in communicating patient level quality measurement data across disparate systems. This standard would enable Healthcare providers those use Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to generate Quality Reporting documents to be consumed by payer agencies such as Centers Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) replacing proprietary file formats that existed in this space previously, This paper discusses various features of this new standard, which promotes interoperability and easy adoption, the three categories proposed by the QRDA standard and their application in different contexts, measure sets and measures and finally the relationship of this QRDA standard to the HQMF (eMeasure) standard proposed by National Quality Forum (NQF) in collaboration with HL7 to standardize the Quality Measures across the healthcare landscape. This paper also provides high-lights on early adoption of QRDA standard by Centers Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for their Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) program.