Status as of August 4, 2026. The ad hoc comment period opened August 3 and closes August 17, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET. All ten retirements are proposed. NCQA has not announced a decision and has not published a date for one.
What NCQA put out for comment
NCQA is asking whether ten HEDIS measures should stop being collected after Measurement Year 2027. This is an ad hoc comment period, opened outside the regular cycle, and it is the second MY2027 comment event of the year. The first closed March 13, 2026 and covered proposed additions: continuous glucose monitoring, follow-up after a positive stool-based colorectal screen, intimate partner violence screening, three person-centered outcome measures, and prenatal syphilis screening. Commenting in March does not mean you saw this list.
One note on sourcing. NCQA's supporting materials are a draft circulated for the comment period and marked obsolete after August 17, so nothing from that document is reproduced here. The measure names and acronyms below come from NCQA's public comment webpage. Every reason in the table is our own summary of what NCQA has said; none of it is quoted. The link to NCQA's page is in the sources at the bottom.
The ten measures
Read the product line column first. It decides whether this is a six-measure problem or a ten-measure problem for your organization.
| Measure | Product lines | Why NCQA wants it gone (our summary) | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documented Assessment After Mammogram (DBM-E) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Stakeholders reported that the results cannot be read reliably, so the rate does not mean what it appears to mean. | This is a data quality failure. It has the weakest case for a defense. |
| Oral Evaluation, Dental Services (OED) | Medicaid | Duplicates a measure already collected in federal programs, so plans report the same thing twice. | Check your state contract before you assume the reporting stops. |
| Topical Fluoride for Children (TFC) | Medicaid | Same alignment argument as OED. | Same state contract check. |
| Diagnosed Mental Health Disorders (DMH) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Reports how prevalent a condition is in the membership. It gives a team nothing to move. | Nothing to work. The reporting hours go somewhere else. |
| Diagnosed Substance Use Disorders (DSU) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Descriptive in the same way DMH is, with no direction of improvement attached. | Same as DMH. |
| Diabetes Monitoring for People With Diabetes and Schizophrenia (SMD) | Medicaid | Denominators are small enough that the rate bounces, and NCQA is looking at a broader serious mental illness measure instead. | Watch for the replacement, not the retirement. |
| Cardiovascular Monitoring for People With Cardiovascular Disease and Schizophrenia (SMC) | Medicaid | Same small denominator and reliability problem as SMD. | Same as SMD. |
| Use of Opioids at High Dosage (HDO) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Plan results sit too close together to separate performance, and the dosage thresholds no longer line up with updated CDC guidance. | Also named on NCQA's MY2028 denied-claims notice. See below. |
| Risk of Continued Opioid Use (COU) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Moves with UOP and has been flat, so it adds little on top of the measure next to it. | Also on the MY2028 denied-claims list. |
| Language Description of Membership (LDM) | Commercial, Medicaid, Medicare | Descriptive, and too coarse to tell a plan how to tailor member communication. | Your language data work continues whether or not the measure does. |
Grouped by NCQA's own logic, the ten fall into four piles. Three are descriptive and not actionable (DMH, DSU, LDM). Four cannot separate one plan from another, either because the denominator is too small or because the measure tracks another measure too closely (SMD, SMC, HDO, COU). Two duplicate a federal program measure (OED, TFC). DBM-E stands alone as a measure whose data does not hold up.
HDO, COU and the MY2028 denied-claims change
HDO and COU appear on a second NCQA notice, and the two documents do not reference each other. In its notification of changes for the MY2027 cycle, NCQA gave advance notice that it will remove the denied-claims exclusion from 21 measures beginning with MY2028, on the reasoning that excluding denied claims can make performance look better than the care actually delivered. HDO and COU are both named on that list of 21. Now they are both proposed for retirement one year earlier.
If the retirement is finalized, the denied-claims change never reaches those two. Take that as intent. The direction here is subtraction: NCQA is thinning its opioid measure set. The measure that survives is UOP, Use of Opioids From Multiple Providers, which is on the denied-claims list and is not on the retirement list. So a pharmacy or quality team planning for the denied-claims work should plan it around UOP and drop HDO and COU from that project until NCQA decides. The two notices are rarely read together, which is why a plan working from the trade coverage of the retirement will keep HDO and COU in a MY2028 remediation plan that may have no reason to exist.
Six touch Medicare. None of them is a Star measure.
Six of the ten apply to the Medicare product line: DBM-E, DMH, DSU, HDO, COU and LDM. The other four, OED, TFC, SMD and SMC, are Medicaid only. An MA-only quality team has six measures in scope here. An IPA or MSO carrying Medicaid lines has all ten.
More important for a Stars director: none of the ten is a Medicare Star Ratings measure. We checked the list against the measure table in the CY2027 Advance Notice and against the eleven measures the CY2027 final rule removes from the Star Ratings. HDO and COU are HEDIS and display-side opioid measures, not Star measures. No cut point moves because of this proposal, no weight changes, and quality bonus payment math is untouched.
What the proposal does not change
Three things get conflated with this list within about a day of it being published. None of them is affected.
- Your Stars workload. Transitions of Care, Glycemic Status Assessment, Breast Cancer Screening, Controlling High Blood Pressure, Colorectal Cancer Screening, Eye Exam for Patients With Diabetes, Kidney Health Evaluation and the Part D adherence measures are all absent from the retirement list. Nothing in the ten touches the gap closure work that carries a rating.
- The hybrid and ECDS transition. That is a separate NCQA program change on a separate schedule, with the hybrid reporting method going away by MY2029 and ECDS versions of Transitions of Care and Care for Older Adults arriving in MY2028. Retirement and ECDS migration are two different fates and the trade coverage regularly mixes them. See our ECDS transition guide for that timeline.
- The March comment cycle. That one proposed additions for MY2027. This one proposes subtractions. They are separate events with separate comment windows.
What to do before August 17
The first decision is whether to comment at all. For most MA-only plans the honest answer is no. Six low-stakes measures leaving a reporting set does not justify a defense, and NCQA is judging these on signal and burden. An argument that says "behavioral health is important" will not land, because NCQA is not arguing that it is unimportant.
Four things to do this month regardless of whether you file.
- Pull your MY2025 rates on the six Medicare-line measures. If your rate is genuinely different from the pack on one of them, you have the only argument NCQA has said it will weigh: that the measure does separate plans. Bring your own rate and denominator.
- If you run Medicaid, check the contract before you celebrate. NCQA retiring OED, TFC, SMD or SMC does not release a state contractual requirement or an accreditation scorecard obligation. That mismatch is the largest practical risk on the whole list, and it is the strongest comment a Medicaid plan can file. Verify your own state and accreditation dependencies before you assert one.
- Confirm someone has a my.ncqa.org login now. The account is free but it has to exist before you can file, and NCQA does not accept comments by mail, email or fax.
- Inventory what only exists to serve these ten. Supplemental data feeds, vendor reports, abstraction time, a validation step in your annual submission. That inventory is the number you get back if the retirement is finalized, and it is the number to have in hand when you decide where the capacity goes.
On that last point, decide where the hours land before they free up. Reporting capacity that comes off DMH and DSU is worth more on a weight 3 measure than spread evenly across everything, and the two HOS outcome measures just moved from weight 1 in the 2026 Star Ratings to weight 3 in the 2027 Star Ratings. If you are looking for somewhere to put reclaimed time, that is where the arithmetic points. Our HOS primer covers what those measures respond to.
How to file a comment
Log in at my.ncqa.org, open Public Comments, click Add Comment and complete the survey. The portal is the only channel. NCQA states plainly that it does not accept comments via mail, email or fax. NCQA support is 888-275-7585, Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. ET.
A comment that lands cites your own measurement year rate and denominator, argues on differentiation and burden, and names the specific downstream contract, accreditation or state requirement that a retirement would break. That last argument is the one almost nobody files, and the one hardest for NCQA to answer with a general policy.
What NCQA decided
Nothing yet, as of August 4, 2026. This section will carry the outcome when NCQA publishes it. NCQA announced August 3, 2026 as the release date for the HEDIS MY2027 Volume 2 technical specifications, so a retirement decided from this comment period would land after those specifications published. And proposals do get reversed: CMS proposed twelve Star Ratings measure removals in the CY2027 rule and finalized eleven, keeping Eye Exam for Patients With Diabetes after comment. Do not build a MY2027 reporting plan that assumes these ten are gone.
How Pelica reads measure churn
Ten measures leaving and seven arriving in the same specification year is the normal state of HEDIS, and it is why tying an operation to a measure list is a bad idea. The data underneath does not change when NCQA renames a numerator. Pelica unifies claims, EHR, pharmacy, lab and ADT data into one live member record and puts a copilot next to the team that owns each contract, so when a measure retires the feed keeps running and the work moves to the next measure instead of being rebuilt.
That is the part quality teams actually spend their year on. At the largest IPA in the country, Pelica closes roughly 90% of BCS and KED gaps in-year and more than 70% of transitions of care gaps within 30 days, with the same headcount and 100% team adoption across 175,000+ patients managed live.
Sources
- NCQA: HEDIS MY 2027 Public Comment (measure list, comment window, submission process)
- NCQA blog: Public Comment Opens Soon, Proposed Retirement of Select HEDIS Measures
- NCQA, Notification of Changes for HEDIS, MY2027 cycle (advance notice removing the denied-claims exclusion from 21 measures beginning MY2028)
- CMS: CY2027 Advance Notice (Table IV-1, the 2027 Star Ratings measure list and weights)
- CMS: Contract Year 2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D Final Rule fact sheet (eleven Star measures removed, Eye Exam retained)
- NCQA: HEDIS Measures