NCQA Validation Is a Starting Line, Not a Finish Line

The healthcare industry is marking a milestone: NCQA has released a full set of digital HEDIS® measures for Measurement Year 2025, and now multiple vendors, including some of the market leaders in traditional HEDIS®, are now able to validate them against NCQA test decks. That’s meaningful progress. Validation matters. 

 But validating digital measures doesn’t mean that you can offer a digital product. If your organization is evaluating digital quality measurement vendors right now, this moment is actually a critical inflection point — not because everyone has caught up, but because it reveals exactly where the real differentiation begins. 

What validation tells you — and what it doesn’t

NCQA validation is a rigorous, important standard. It tells you that a vendor can execute a defined measure correctly against a defined specification. What it doesn’t tell you is how they are doing it, and how much of their existing products are actually built to take advantage of it.   

I’m going to tell you right now, that NCQA validation is just the very first struggle for a digital HEDIS® vendor. And I know this better than anyone else because Astrata has been developing our digital quality engine for over 6 years, and we have tackled all of these problems to get where we are now. 

Passing a validation test and building a platform that actually drives quality improvement at scale are two very different engineering problems. One is about passing the test at a point in time. The other is about having a real and deployable digital product with continuous, explainable, actionable insight.   

The product questions nobody is asking 

When a vendor achieves digital measure validation, the natural question is: how? There’s a meaningful difference between deploying a digital engine alongside an existing legacy platform so that you can pass the validation test and building a digital-first architecture from the ground up.   

Legacy platforms were designed for a different era of quality measurement — one defined by manual data extraction, monthly batch processing, and results that arrived long after the care events they described. Running a digital measure engine separately and alongside your legacy platform doesn’t change that underlying model. You still get a correct number, delivered too late to act on, with little visibility into what drove it.   

But a digital-first architecture changes the model entirely. Measurement becomes automated, not manual. Processing becomes incremental and continuous, not batched and periodic. Results reflect current clinical reality, not a snapshot from months ago. And when a gap exists, clinicians can know about it in time to close it, not after the measurement year has ended. 

At Astrata, we built eMeasure as a fully FHIR-native, digital-first engine — not adapted from prior-generation batch processing. We’ve built on a foundation of standards, so you’re future-proofed as the industry moves to FHIR. We’ve created a product that can scale in every direction – frequency of measure runs, size of populations, and clinical data detail. And our solution is flexible enough to let you control your future – running your own measures and adjusting measures as you need them to meet your population health goals. 

Digital measures as the foundation for population health 

The broader ambition of digital quality measurement is to create a closed loop between measurement, insight, and intervention. That loop only closes if measurement is continuous and current. Vendors that are running a digital engine but still plan to use their existing batch-oriented traditional product cannot support the kind of proactive care management that actually moves outcomes. 

This is the work Astrata is doing. Not just meeting the validation bar — but building the infrastructure that makes measurement genuinely useful for the organizations who depend on it to improve outcomes and manage risk.