Taiwan’s official CQL guidance
Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare and its National Health Insurance Administration have started writing NHI rules in CQL. This page summarizes the official platform and implementation guides published so far: what each contains, its current version and status, and how CQL Workbench relates to them.
A summary, not an official document: CQL Workbench summarized these public sources and last checked them on 2026-10-28. For rules and versions, the announcements of the ministry and the NHI Administration take precedence.
The big picture
The three official resources come from the ministry and the NHI Administration. This is how they fit together, and how hospitals use them.
builds on TWPAS and reads the request data it defines
NHI prior authorization guide (TWPAS)FHIRThe FHIR data hospitals exchange when requesting prior authorization.builds on
- use rules from the Taiwan Health Rule Space and update them with each library notice
- request prior authorization from the NHI Administration in the TWPAS format
At prescribing time, CDS Hooks sends a rule’s result back to the system to tell the clinician whether the criteria are met. This is the use the ministry’s report describes.
CQL Workbench is not an official tool and doesn’t connect to any of these. It works one step earlier, splitting a clause into conditions and generating CQL you can compare with the official CQL above.
Why the ministry is adopting CQL
On 13 October 2025 the ministry’s Department of Information Management held its CQL International Symposium and Workshop at the National Taiwan University Hospital International Convention Center. The press release names CQL as one of the three core information standards of the ministry’s next-generation digital healthcare platform program (次世代數位醫療平臺計畫). In the morning, the NHI Administration presented its plan to use CQL for cancer drug prior authorization, and Taiwan CDC described bringing CQL into Taiwan’s care quality indicator system. In the afternoon, participants wrote CQL rules, validated them in a sandbox and connected them to a CDS service to simulate alerts during a visit.
According to the ministry’s report on its CQL International Symposium, its Department of Information Management splits EHR interoperability into three standards, each with one job:
- FHIR
- Data format: how patients, lab results, medications and other records are represented.
- CQL
- Decision rules: which conditions the data must meet, such as NHI reimbursement criteria.
- CDS Hooks
- Alerts: sending a rule’s result back to the hospital system while the clinician is prescribing.
The report uses the NHI criteria for statins as an example: once written in CQL, a rule is written once and shared across Taiwan, and the system can tell clinicians at prescribing time whether the criteria are met, instead of every hospital translating the text into its own code. The report also announced the Taiwan Health Rule Space described next.
Taiwan Health Rule Space (THRS)
The ministry’s platform for sharing rules (臺灣健康規則空間). Its core is the CQL Library: each rule maps to an NHI fee schedule code, such as 08134B for continuous glucose monitoring, and is grouped by specialty and subspecialty. The site also has an introduction to CQL, a CQL course area, a sandbox and a page for proposing CQL rules.
When the fee schedule changes, the platform posts a rule library notice listing rules that were removed, given a new NHI code or moved to another specialty. Hospitals whose systems use those rules need to update them to match.
- Publisher
- Ministry of Health and Welfare
- Status
- Live; rules are updated as the fee schedule changes.
NHI pre-check rule CQL implementation guide
A FHIR implementation guide (臺灣健保預檢規則實作指引, Taiwan NHI Clinical Quality Language Implementation Guide) that writes the reimbursement criteria for cancer drug prior authorization as CQL libraries. It builds on TWPAS, described next: the rules read the FHIR R4 request data that TWPAS defines and decide whether a request meets the criteria.
It currently covers breast, lung, colorectal, liver and prostate cancer. Each reimbursement rule for each drug is one library, such as the larotrectinib rule for colorectal cancer, and each cancer type also has a code set and a shared module used by its rules.
- Publisher
- National Health Insurance Administration
- Status
- Continuous integration build 0.0.1, marked as a draft and still changing. The official URL the guide declares, under the NHI Administration’s nhicore.nhi.gov.tw, was not live when we checked.
NHI prior authorization implementation guide (TWPAS)
The NHI Administration’s FHIR implementation guide (臺灣健保事前審查實作指引) for the data hospitals send when they request prior authorization. It covers submissions, supplementary submissions, appeals and dispute reviews, and builds on TW Core IG 0.3.2.
Its navigation links to the pre-check rule guide above: TWPAS defines what the data looks like, and the pre-check guide uses CQL to decide whether that data meets the reimbursement criteria.
- Publisher
- National Health Insurance Administration
- Status
- STU 1.2.7 (Standard for Trial Use), the version the NHI Administration currently publishes.
Where CQL Workbench fits
CQL Workbench is not an official tool and does not connect to these platforms. It handles an earlier step: splitting a reimbursement clause into conditions that can be reviewed one by one, then generating CQL you can verify. The two kinds of CQL are also written differently:
That makes them useful to compare: split the clause into conditions in the workbench, have clinicians confirm that every condition matches the source text, then compare the result with the official CQL for the same rule in the Taiwan Health Rule Space or the pre-check guide, looking for conditions that are missing or extra.
Sources
All links were checked on 2026-10-28.
- Press release on the ministry’s CQL International Symposium and Workshop (衛福部「CQL國際研討會暨工作坊」登場 邁向醫療邏輯標準化 打造臨床決策共享新基礎), Ministry of Health and Welfare
- CQL International Symposium and Workshop report, part 2: the role of CQL in Taiwan's EHR interoperability platform (CQL國際研討會暨工作坊 會後報導 系列2｜CQL在台灣電子病歷互通平台中的角色), Ministry of Health and Welfare
- Taiwan Health Rule Space (THRS) (臺灣健康規則空間), Ministry of Health and Welfare
- Taiwan NHI Clinical Quality Language Implementation Guide (臺灣健保預檢規則實作指引), National Health Insurance Administration
- Taiwan NHI Prior Authorization Support Implementation Guide (TWPAS) (臺灣健保事前審查實作指引), National Health Insurance Administration