Introduction

This implementation guide contains common FHIR assets for use in US-based content IGs built using the approach and specifications developed as part of the Clinical Quality Framework (CQF) initiative, including the USCore-ModelInfo and USCommon libraries.

The CQF approach brings a suite of standards and methodologies to bear on the problem of authoring, sharing, and evaluating clinical knowledge, with the goal of streamlining the development and implementation of guideline-based clinical care.

For more information on this approach, see the Approach and Methodology sections of the FHIR Clinical Guidelines implementation guide.

Contents

This implementation guide contains libraries that facilitate the use of CQL with FHIR in the US Realm, as explained in the sections below. To use these libraries in your implementation guide, include a reference to this implementation guide as an implementation guide dependency:

<dependsOn id="cqf-us">
  <uri value="http://fhir.org/guides/cqf/us/common/ImplementationGuide/fhir.cqf.us.common"/>
  <packageId value="fhir.cqf.us.common"/>
  <version value="0.1.0"/>
</dependsOn>

USCore ModelInfo

Clinical Quality Language (CQL) is a high-level, domain-specific language focused on clinical quality and targeted at measure and decision support artifact authors. In addition, the CQL specification provides a machine-readable canonical representation called Expression Logical Model (ELM) targeted at implementations and designed to enable automated sharing of clinical knowledge.

​To use CQL with USCore, model information must be provided to the implementation environment. The USCore-ModelInfo library provides this information for US Core. To use USCore, include a using declaration as shown in the example below:

using USCore version '3.1.1'

Although not required by CQL, current best-practice is to include the version of USCore.