Health Quality Measure Format (HQMF) is a standards-based representation of quality measures as electronic documents written in XML. It is developed by Health Level Seven International® (HL7), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited standards development organization. Since 2019, HQMF is used in conjunction with Clinical Quality Language (CQL) as CQL-based HQMF to define eCQMs. CQL defines the measure logic, QDM defines the data model, and HQMF defines measure metadata and population structure.

An HQMF document provides measure details that identify and classify the measure and provide important metadata about the measure. Metadata defined in the HQMF document header include descriptions of the measure populations, any stratifications, the measure steward, measure type, identifiers, rationale, scoring, references to articles, definitions of value sets and/or direct reference codes referenced in the CQL, and other details.

An HQMF document body contains a Population Criteria section and a Data Criteria section. The Population Criteria section defines the measure populations (e.g., denominator, numerator, exclusions, measure observation) and assigns their identifiers. The Data Criteria section defines the patient data of interest in the measure as a set of entries. Each entry identifies specific types of data along with constraints that the data must meet.