Aligning CDS and Quality Measurement

Jane Metzger, Research Principal, and Marta Arthur, Principal Researcher, CSC. For most hospitals, the dust is settling on Stage 1 of meaningful use and efforts have turned to Stage 2. The time is right to start tying individual elements of meaningful use into a more comprehensive and unified strategy that sets the stage for using the EHR more deliberately as quality improvement infrastructure. Aligning quality measurement and related clinical decision support is an important element of this strategy. We review the rationale, the EHR data that matter the most in this quest, and some of the major challenges.