People get their health care from many different places, and information about their health sits in those many different places. Why does this matter? For providers caring for patients, a fuller picture of the care their patient has received means the provider has the tools to understand their needs and make better recommendations. The HEDIS ECDS measures promote that principle. ECDS stands for “electronic clinical data systems.” That includes everything from electronic health records and case management systems, to registries and claims data for measure reporting. ECDS measures encourage health plans to get and share health information electronically with health care providers so that all may better manage their members.

ECDS is a new data reporting method. We know learning something new always means bumps along the way. We learn from those bumps. Then, we improve.

That approach has already yielded significant progress for the ECDS domain. “ECDS Experience” is a new project that shares how health plans are developing solutions for collecting and reporting ECDS measures.

Inside Health Care introduces our first “ECDS Experience” story. NCQA’s Catherine Clair sits down with Pete Stoessel of AmeriHealth Caritas District of Columbia to talk about why ECDS is so important now and how his team is making progress with collecting data for ECDS measures.