Comparison of eCQM Certification Programs

Diameter Health compared the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) Project Cypress tool for certifying software that performs electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) calculation with NCQA’s ONC-approved eCQM certification program and found that NCQA’s program is much more robust. That is because NCQA’s program, unlike Project Cypress that ONC and all other ONC-approved certifying entities use, assesses every aspect of measure logic, includes measure-specific test decks that have known errors to make sure systems can catch and fix them, and also requires recertification for specification updates that have potential to introduce errors.