QDM 4.1 Update Available

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), in conjunction with its federal partner the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), released the Quality Data Model (QDM) 4.1.

The QDM describes clinical concepts in a standardized format to enable electronic clinical quality measurement. The model is the backbone for representing criteria used in quality measures that are currently used by stakeholders involved in electronic quality measurement development and reporting.

The QDM 4.1 adds several new operators and attributes, listed below.

Union and Intersection operators
Fulfills general relationship operator
Ends Concurrent With Start and Starts Concurrent With End timing operators
Medication, Order attributes: signed datetime and active datetime
Care Goal attribute: target outcome

In addition to new operators and attributes, QDM 4.1 also includes several modifications to the previous version of the specification.

Starts Before Or During renamed to Starts Before End
Ends Before Or During renamed to Ends Before End
Patient Characteristic Expired attribute reason renamed to cause
Measurement Start Date and Measurement End Date removed in favor ofMeasurement Period
Ambiguous and/or undefined datatypes/attributes clarified or removed (seeQDM-46)
QDM data elements restricted to only one attribute at a time
Guidance provided regarding the topic of cumulative medication duration