Glossary

A QCDR is an entity with clinical expertise in medicine and in quality measurement development that collects medical or clinical data on behalf of a Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) eligible clinician for the purpose of patient and disease tracking to foster improvement in the quality of care provided to patients.

A Qualified Registry is a vendor that collects clinical data from an individual MIPS-eligible clinician, group, or virtual group and submits it to CMS on their behalf.

The QDM is an information model defining relationships between patients and clinical concepts in a standardized format to enable electronic quality performance measurement. The model is the current structure for electronically representing quality measure concepts for interested parties involved in electronic quality measurement development and reporting. The QDM provides the language defining the criteria for clinical quality measurement. It allows the electronic definition of a clinical concept via its data elements and provides the vocabulary to relate them to each other. By relating attributes between data elements and using filtering functions, the QDM provides a method to construct complex clinical representations for eCQMs.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act defined a quality measure as “a standard for measuring the performance and improvement of population health or of health plans, providers of services, and other clinicians in the delivery of health care services.” (Pub. L. 111-148, 931)

QRDA is a standard document format for the exchange of eCQM data. QRDA documents contain data extracted from EHRs and other health IT systems, used to exchange eCQM data between systems, serve as the data submission standards for a variety of quality measurement and reporting initiatives, and adopted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) as the standard to support both QRDA Category I (individual patient) and QRDA Category III (aggregate) data submission.