The Joint Commission, in a news release, said it is “shepherding in the next generation of clinical quality” by boosting the capabilities of its quality measure program to provide accredited hospitals with year-round, real-time access to quality measures. Over the last two years, the organization says its electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) reporting process has increased value and reduced burden for thousands of the 4,500 accredited hospitals with a Direct Data Submission Platform (DDSP).
The Joint Commission says now it has made the platform and quality measure results always available, which means providers can measure and improve performance in near real-time without assistance from outside vendors. “With The Joint Commission’s DDSP, accredited hospitals now have additional tools to go beyond simply sending data one way, but using that information to improve quality performance and data accuracy in near real-time,” the agency stated.
The DDSP is the first solution to make clinical quality language-based eCQMs available to providers in an execution environment where they can generate and use the results continuously, said The Joint Commission in a statement. Clinical quality language (CQL) is the new industry standard for measures, used by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for 2019 eCQM reporting, and endorsed by HL7 International. CQL brings together the underlying logic of quality measurement, clinical pathways, clinical decision support and more. It can eliminate manual translation of measures, requiring fewer resources and less time spent in measures implementation. The Joint Commission can now use a single environment to specify, develop, test, and distribute CQL measures for use.
The Joint Commission has partnered with Apervita to provide the cloud platform that underpins this program by enabling providers to specify, develop, test, and execute eCQMs, as well as create and distribute applications that use them, in the cloud at scale. Apervita’s mission is aligned with The Joint Commission to reduce cost and improve quality.
