NCQA Receives KLAS Points of Light Award for Demonstrating the Feasibility of Bulk FHIR Exchange

We are excited to announce that NCQA and our partners, eHealth Exchange, Cambia Health Solutions and MultiCare Health System, received a 2026 KLAS Points of Light Award for a Payer/Provider Initiative. Our work to advance digital quality measurement was a cross-sector collaboration that demonstrated how Bulk FHIR^® transforms quality data exchange.

The Problem: Fragmented, Manual and Inconsistent Data Exchange

Quality measurement has historically depended on manual chart reviews, point-to-point interfaces and inconsistent data feeds, resulting in administrative burden and delays in Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS^®) reporting. As organizations transition toward digital quality measurement, retrieving accurate and complete patient rosters across organizational boundaries remains operationally complex.

While Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®) is recognized as the industry standard for exchanging healthcare data, adoption remains inconsistent. EHR infrastructure is typically optimized for one-at-a-time patient retrieval, so scaling to thousands of members introduces performance constraints. And many HEDIS-certified vendors do not yet accept FHIR-native inputs, requiring additional mapping from FHIR resources into proprietary vendor formats for HEDIS reporting.

The Solution: Moving Toward Adoption of Bulk FHIR

NCQA convened the Bulk FHIR Quality Coalition to perform real-world testing of data exchange using interoperable data formats at scale and to evaluate the quality of FHIR data. Cambria, MultiCare and eHealth Exchange were the first cohort of organizations to participate in the coalition.

Using a secure, Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA™)-aligned network and a single connection between organizations, the teams built and tested systems that could exchange large volumes of standardized clinical data for quality reporting.

Each organization had a specific role:

• NCQA provided access to Digital HEDIS FHIR Implementation Guides and a sample of HEDIS measures codified in Clinical Quality Language.
• eHealth Exchange served as the interoperability intermediary, architecting a single-connection model that eliminated bespoke point-to-point integrations, enabling MultiCare and Cambria to transact Bulk FHIR data within a TEFCA-aligned trust framework.
• MultiCare implemented a production-grade Bulk FHIR endpoint within their Azure API and Epic ecosystem and leveraged a cloud-enabled data repository to support high-volume export requests.
• Cambria generated fully attributed member rosters, initiated Bulk FHIR export requests, built ingestion pipelines to retrieve the data, validated data completeness and mapped standardized FHIR outputs into its HEDIS-certified vendor’s proprietary calculation environment for reporting.

Results

The collaboration showed that regulated APIs and shared FHIR profiles can operate consistently at scale when supported by governance, attribution standards and data quality validation.

• Cambia and MultiCare successfully exchanged HEDIS-relevant clinical data for over 5,000 attributed members, validating data completeness for quality reporting.
• MultiCare reduced chart-chasing costs by approximately $50 per chart and improved medical record procurement performance by 175% compared to baseline manual workflows.
• Automated polling and retrieval reduced bulk export timelines from days or weeks to minutes, significantly accelerating quality reporting cycles.

Learn More

Read the full case study, Operationalizing Bulk FHIR for Scalable Quality Measurement.

Visit NCQA’s Digital Quality Hub for information and resources to support the transition to digital quality measurement.

FHIR^® is a registered trademark of Health Level Seven International; use does not constitute endorsement by HL7.

HEDIS^® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).