NCQA Approved by Government as ONC-Authorized Testing Lab

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has announced that its eMeasure testing laboratory is now approved by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).

As an ONC-Authorized Testing Lab (ONC-ATL), NCQA can now perform health IT tests as part of the ONC Health IT Certification program. According to the announcement, NCQA is the only approved alternative to this government-based electronic quality measure testing procedure.

With this approval, health IT and data vendors can use the NCQA generated test decks for two certifications: ONC HIT Certification for use in reporting electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) to CMS for the Quality Payment Program; as well as NCQA eMeasure certification for use in NCQA’s recognition for Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and as a standard supplemental dataset in support of HEDIS (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set) reporting.

“As the country moves from fee for service to fee for value, there is an increasing reliance on performance measurement. NCQA is pleased to provide the industry a rigorous validation of the systems being used to produce these rates,” said Rick Moore, CIO, NCQA. “We believe our 20-year history of producing HEDIS, the most widely used nationally comparable performance measurement set, offers vendors an assuredness that when they pass our testing, their system is ready to accurately select the correct records for reporting.”