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Given the close relationship between clinical decision support (CDS) and quality measurement (QM), it has been proposed that a standards-based CDS Web service could be leveraged to enable QM. Benefits of such a CDS-QM framework include semantic consistency and implementation efficiency. However, earlier research has identified execution performance as a critical barrier when CDS-QM is applied to large populations. Here, we describe challenges encountered and solutions devised to optimize CDS-QM execution performance. Through these optimizations, the CDS-QM execution time was optimized approximately three orders of magnitude, such that approximately 370,000 patient records can now be evaluated for 22 quality measure groups in less than 5 hours (approximately 2 milliseconds per measure group per patient). Several key optimization methods were identified, with the most impact achieved through population-based retrieval of relevant data, multi-step data staging, and parallel processing. These optimizations have enabled CDS-QM to be operationally deployed at an enterprise level.

Electronic quality measurement (QM) and clinical decision support (CDS) are closely related but are typically implemented independently, resulting in significant duplication of effort. While it seems intuitive that technical approaches could be re-used across these two related use cases, such reuse is seldom reported in the literature, especially for standards-based approaches. Therefore, we evaluated the feasibility of using a standards-based CDS framework aligned with anticipated EHR certification criteria to implement electronic QM. The CDS-QM framework was used to automate a complex national quality measure (SCIP-VTE-2) at an academic healthcare system which had previously relied on time-consuming manual chart abstractions. Compared with 305 manually-reviewed reference cases, the recall of automated measurement was 100%. The precision was 96.3% (CI:92.6%-98.5%) for ascertaining the denominator and 96.2% (CI:92.3%-98.4%) for the numerator. We therefore validated that a standards-based CDS-QM framework can successfully enable automated QM, and we identified benefits and challenges with this approach.