Developing a Semantic Web-based Framework for Executing the Clinical Quality Language Using FHIR

The Clinical Quality Language (CQL) is a HL7 specification, aiming to provide a human-readable language to define clinical quality measures and decision support rules while it makes logic expressions independent of any specific data model (e.g., Quality Data Model, HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources – FHIR). FHIR adopts RDF as its third representation/interchange format in addition to XML and JSON, and uses the Shape Expressions (ShEx) schema to standardize and validate the FHIR RDF graphs. In this presentation, we propose a Semantic Web-based framework that enables the execution of CQL using the FHIR RDF technologies. The framework comprises the following four modules: 1) a CQL-to-SPARQL transformation module; 2) a value set service module; 3) a FHIR RDF transformation module; and 4) a ShEx-based data validation module. We implemented a prototype to demonstrate the utility of the framework and discussed the challenges and ongoing tasks.