The Future of HEDIS: Digital Measures & ECDS Recap

The Future of HEDIS: Digital Measures & ECDS Recap

The HEDIS measures are a health care performance improvement tool. The HEDIS tool looks at 6 main domains of care. These 6 domains include: effectiveness of care, access or availability of care, experience of care, utilization and risk adjusted utilization, health plan descriptive information, and measures collected using electronic clinical data systems. The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) manages the HEDIS measures. The different measures are reported by different healthcare plans and organizations to the NCQA.

As the NCQA looks for ways in improve the HEDIS measures, the tool continues to evolve. In order to help keep the health plans aware of the updates and changes, the NCQA is holding a series of webinars on the future of HEDIS. The future of HEDIS centers on 5 core ideas: allowable adjustments, licensing and certification, digital measures, electronic clinical data systems, and schedule changes.

ECDS Webinar

NCQA held a webinar, the third episode on the future of HEDIS series, focused on the digital measures and ECDS this past month. The digital measures are HEDIS specifications that can be downloaded directly into different users’ data systems to enable new ease. The digitalized versions of existing HEDIS measures have been reported to NCQA since the early 1990’s. The advantages of digital measures include an easier way to transfer measures into your IT system, less interpretation, recoding and human error, and harmonization with industry standards. Digital versions of existing measures are important to make it easier for health plans to measure quality. ECDS stands for the electronic clinical data systems. This is a new reporting method that helps create clinical data insight for managing the health of individuals and groups. The ECDS was designed to help HEDIS implementers understand how health IT can help increase the efficiency of quality reporting and provide incentive to connect to data in other sources. Organizations that report ECDS encourage sharing and interoperability of health data systems, ensuring that the information needed to provide high-quality services to reach the right people. There are different eligible data types of ECDS reporting. ECDS reporting includes electronic health record, health information exchange/clinical registry, case management system, and administration data/claims processing system.

Reach out to us today!

If you have any questions on the updated ECDS system and would like to see how we can help you, give Chart Review Nurses a call today! Our specialists at Chart Review Nurses are ready to answer your questions by calling (877) 328-2343.