I’m pleased to announce CQL Studio 2.0, the next step in the suite’s roadmap for authoring, executing, and testing Clinical Quality Language (CQL) and FHIR-based artifacts. The focus of the 2.0.x series is terminology search and import for immediate usage in your CQL artifacts.
The headline addition is direct integration with the U.S. Value Set Authority Center (VSAC). A new VSAC Browser lets you use your free UMLS API key to search NLM’s FHIR terminology service, inspect value sets, and import them into your configured local terminology server. Requests are proxied through CQL Studio Server, as NLM does not allow integrating directly from your browser. (This mirrors the former CDS Connect Authoring Tool pattern, but keeps everything inside the CQL Studio environment.)
But value sets don’t always stand alone; compose references and include/exclude chains can leave your local server incomplete if you don’t go down the value set dependency rabbit hole. CQL Studio 2.0 adds recursive dependency resolution and import into the local terminology server, with a dependency tree you can review before importing. You can import the whole transitive tree in one pass, or just suck in only the direct search result of interest without manually chasing every referenced value set.
Due to licenses restrictions we aren’t able to ship pre-loaded terminologies such as SNOMED, but are working on more usable ways to trigger full imports. If you are using the bundled default HAPI FHIR server for terminology, we recommend avoiding full terminology system imports unless necessary by your value sets or
Also new to 2.x is alpha support for the FHIR NPM package registry for searching published implementation guides and specification packages, resolving transitive dependencies from each package’s manifest, and importing selected resources in dependency order into terminology and/or your FHIR data server. The FHIR Registry Importer is marked experimental; package graphs and resource routing are still evolving, but it’s a practical path toward pulling US Core, US Core Quality (QI-Core), or other IGs into your self-hosted stack without the tediuos download-and-unpack ritual.
Early-stage work has also started on SQL on FHIR: an experimental workspace that sketches a pipeline from FHIR Library through ELM translation, SQL generation, execution, and MeasureReport-style output. It is not yet functional in 2.0, with parts of the workflow still stubbed while the architectural approach settles. We expect the next functional increment in the 2.1.x series.
CQL Studio remains Apache 2.0 software in the cqframework family, with the evergreen HL7 Foundry distribution bundling CQL Studio (UI), CQL Studio Server, HAPI FHIR, and related components. External integrations (VSAC, package registry) stay opt-in: nothing phones home until you configure credentials and endpoints.
Please sumbit bug reports, feature requests, and feedback on GitHub!
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