EHR Clinical Quality Measures Testing Platform Goes Live

The Office for the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has released the beta version of certification tool, Cypress, which tests EHRs and EHR modules in calculating Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs). ONC says its certification program “provides a defined process” to ensure certificated EHRs meet the adopted standards and criteria of meaningful use.

Cypress, an ONC-commissioned project, has reportedly encoded the measure logic required in software implementation and has released Eligible Professionals (EP), Eligible Hospitals (EH) and QRDA1 test decks in its beta version. EHR vendors can now download these test decks within their EHRs to test MU 2014 eCQM certification requirements.

Back in October, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) posted the final CQMS for 2014 on its website. CQMs will change in 2014 for providers, and those that are eligible for meaningful use, either Stage 1 or Stage 2, will have included the new criteria in their EHRs, CMS says. For eligible professionals (EPs) there are 64 CQMs in total and they will have to report on nine of them. For eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals, there are 29 CQMs and 16 of them will have to be included.