Interoperability standards organization HL7 has added to its growing stable of FHIR accelerators with one focused on quality improvement.

The Quality Improvement Accelerator is seeking founding members to help establish priorities, guide governance, and pilot new FHIR-based implementation guidance supporting digital quality measurement, clinical decision support, and computable clinical guidelines.

HL7 plans to convene healthcare organizations, federal agencies, clinical societies, quality measure developers, payers, technology vendors, and other stakeholders to advance practical, standards-based approaches to quality improvement.

“We've got great support from government entities —  CMS, CDC, and others. And some U.S. national quality bodies are interested,” said HL7 CEO Rachel Dunscombe in a recent interview with Healthcare Innovation. “We've got industry really interested. We've got a really nice ecosystem forming,” she added. “I think the challenge with the quality accelerator is putting the parameters around it. We've had to do a lot of workshopping because quality runs from the quality of care through to the data quality. Quality can mean so many things.”

In a statement accompanying the announcement of the quality accelerator, Dunscombe said healthcare has made significant progress digitizing clinical information, yet quality improvement remains fragmented across organizations, programs, and technologies. “The opportunity now is to align the community around shared, standards-based approaches that reduce complexity, encourage reuse, and make it easier to translate quality initiatives into measurable improvements in care.”

“Quality improvement is ultimately a shared effort,” added Anne Smith, co-chair of the HL7 Clinical Quality Information Work Group, in a statement. “This accelerator provides a forum for organizations with different perspectives and responsibilities to work together on common implementation challenges, reducing duplication while building resources that benefit the broader healthcare community.”

In our recent interview, Dunscombe said the work of the FHIR accelerators has evolved over time. “It was almost Darwinian in the beginning. We had the accelerators. We worked out what's worked, what hasn't worked, and what we should standardize,” she said. “We have found over time that there are certain things that they need to do consistently to feed the learnings back into the standard, but also there are certain things that need to vary by accelerator. What we've done is create a playbook that's being used to create the new accelerators. We're codifying what works and things that need to be consistent, including governance.”

The most recently announced accelerator is Caliper, launched in March 2026 to improve the real-time exchange, integration, and use of data generated by medical and personal health devices.

Others include the Argonaut Project, CARIN Alliance, CodeX, Da Vinci Project, FHIR at Scale Taskforce (FAST), Gravity Project, Helios, and Vulcan.