Driving Quality and Performance Measurement - A Foundation for Clinical Decision Support 

Increasing deployment, adoption, and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs) and health IT systems in the United States offers great potential to improve the healthcare system. An important means to advance this goal is to measure performance, ensuring that relevant clinical knowledge is available at the point of care and implemented in a manner that promotes optimal care delivery. Properly positioned, clinical decision support (CDS) tools can play an important role. This report describes the development of the NQF CDS Taxonomy, the relationship between quality measurement and CDS, and the mapping of the Taxonomy to the Quality Data Model (formerly QDS) —an information model that lays the foundation for automatic, patient-centric, longitudinal quality measurement. The CDS Taxonomy should assist health IT system developers, system implementers, and the quality improvement community to develop tools, content, and procedures that are compatible and enable comprehensive use of CDS, thereby improving delivery of appropriate, evidenced-based care.