The CMS wants to know whether hospitals will be able to begin submitting some previously established quality measures through their electronic health-record systems by 2014.

The agency published a request for information (PDF) Friday asking hospitals and information technology vendors about the feasibility of using certified EHRs to submit patient-level data on clinical quality measures.

The initiative is aimed at "increasing efficiency and reducing the burden associated with hospital collection and submission of patient-level data on clinical quality measures," according to the posting.

The CMS envisions that "hospitals will be able to switch primarily to EHR-based reporting of clinical quality data for many measures that are currently manually chart-abstracted and submitted to CMS" for the hospital inpatient quality-reporting program.

Although not all hospitals are yet using a certified EHR system, more than 3,300 hospitals have qualified to participate in the program and receive an incentive payment since the federal EHR incentive payment program was launched in January 2011, according to the CMS.