Minimizing Burden in Federal Quality Measurement and Public Health Reporting

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) 2020 interoperability rules created formal processes for advancing standards and implementation by encouraging innovation with data exchange and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) application programming interface (API) technology. The pending progress in interoperability creates an opportunity to move to leverage standardized data and FHIR® solutions. This session will explore initiatives by the two agencies, CMS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CMS has set the goal of transitioning to full digital quality measurement. This panel will explain key CMS activities to redesign quality measures to use modular FHIR® API technology solutions to transform the CMS quality measurement enterprise. CDC is automating electronic data exchange to help reduce the burden of sending and receiving data for a variety of public health activities, including disease detection, public health emergency response, and research. To that end, the CDC-led initiative on Making Electronic Data More Available for Research and Public Health (MedMorph) has developed a robust reference architecture that can be leveraged for many uses, including quality reporting, to help streamline reporting across multiple use cases and therefore minimize burden.