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The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse™ (NQMC) is a database and Web site for information on specific evidence-based health care quality measures and measure sets. NQMC is sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to promote widespread access to quality measures by the health care community and other interested individuals. NQMC has been available as a public resource since February 2003.
The NQMC mission is to provide practitioners, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining detailed information on quality measures, and to further their dissemination, implementation, and use in order to inform health care decisions. NQMC builds on AHRQ's previous initiatives in quality measurement, including the Computerized Needs-Oriented Quality Measurement Evaluation System (CONQUEST), the Expansion of Quality of Care Measures (Q-SPAN) project, the Quality Measurement Network (QMNet) project, and the Performance Measures Inventory (PMI).
See the About NQMC Web page for additional information about this national initiative.
Information available on the NQMC Web site is intended primarily for the following audiences:
Information available on the NQMC Web site is used by professionals affiliated with a variety of institutions including:
The NQMC Web site logs approximately 116,026 visits each month, with most visits occurring during the work week. In addition, NQMC sends out weekly e-mail notices of newly published measures to more than 23,791 subscribed users.
NQMC currently contains summaries for more than 1,750 measures from scores of national and international organizations. Refer to NQMC's Measure Index for the exact total at any given time; refer to the Organization Browse for a listing of represented measure developers.
NQMC reaches a broad audience within the United States and abroad, thereby offering developers an effective vehicle for the dissemination of quality measures that meet the NQMC Inclusion Criteria. New measure submissions are featured in the NQMC News and on the Measures In Progress page; when measure summaries are posted to the NQMC Web site they are announced in our What's New Weekly E-mail.
Participating measure developing organizations are provided the benefit of receiving measure summary usage reports (annually and by special request) that highlight the number of times (i.e., page views) that each of their measures were accessed on the NQMC Web site over a specified period of time. This information is an indicator of dissemination of the published measure(s) within the NQMC audience.
The success of NQMC depends of the active participation of contributing measure developers. Your role as a participant is to:
*Note: For measures in the public domain, no copyright permission is required.
To facilitate submission of your/your organization's health care quality measures, we offer this guidance:
Vivian Coates
NGC/NQMC Project Director
ECRI Institute
5200 Butler Pike
Plymouth Meeting, PA 19462
Questions regarding submissions can be directed to Ms. Coates at info@qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov.
Additional information regarding NQMC is available from Mary Nix, Project Officer, Center for Outcomes and Evidence, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), e-mail: info@qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov.
Visit our Sister Site, the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC), and submit your evidence-based clinical practice guidelines.
NQMC provides two reference tools to assist in your submission; the Template of Measure Attributes and the Glossary. These tools are available in the Measure Submission Kit below. The NQMC Template of Measure Attributes provides descriptions of each attribute in a NQMC Complete Measure Summary. Attributes required to meet NQMC Inclusion Criteria (see above) are in bold-face type. The NQMC Glossary provides clarifying definitions and examples of terms used to describe common properties of health care quality measures used in the structured abstracts (measure summaries).
| Download entire Measure Submission Kit | ZIP FILE (482 KB) | ||
| Instructions for Electronic/Hard Copy Submission | PDF (61 KB) | MS WORD (44 KB) | TEXT (2 KB) |
| NQMC Inclusion Criteria | PDF (89 KB) | MS WORD (77 KB) | HTML |
| Measure Submission Checklist | PDF (90 KB) | MS WORD (53 KB) | TEXT (4 KB) |
| Template of Measure Attributes | PDF (111 KB) | MS WORD (195 KB) | HTML |
| Glossary of Terms | PDF (136 KB) | MS WORD (86 KB) | HTML |
| Copyright Agreement Form | PDF (43 KB) | MS WORD (51 KB) | TEXT (4 KB) |
Submission Timeline
There are 9 criteria that measures must meet to be included in NQMC. Please see the Inclusion Criteria page.
Submitting a measure to NQMC does not mean that you will be relinquishing ownership (should it be accepted for inclusion in NQMC). NQMC creates a structured abstract of each measure (Measure Summary). Complete measure specification information is not included in the measure summaries. In addition, providing direct access to the full-text of your instrument/measure on the NQMC Web site is not required. Alternatively, you may provide us with ordering information for users who wish to acquire the full measure from the developer.
In general, there are no copyright restrictions that prevent users from copying and/or distributing content found on the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse™ (NQMC) Web site, provided that all such content is appropriately identified. NQMC's content (i.e., measure summaries) is available for public use, and we encourage the distribution of our content, particularly for educational purposes.
NQMC summary content may not however, be used for commercial and/or product endorsement purposes. In addition, in rare instances some measure developers have requested more restricted use of the measure summaries of their measures.
NQMC staff seeks permission from measure developers to include summaries of the original full-text measures that appear at www.qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov. Consequently, NQMC does NOT have the authority to grant copyright clearance for the original full text measures. Users must contact the measure developer directly with such requests.
Users can refer to the "COPYRIGHT STATEMENT" field at the end of the NQMC Summary for information pertaining to restrictions as specified by the individual measure developers regarding the original full-text measure, and/or less frequently, the NQMC measure summary itself.
Measure specifications are submitted by measure developing organizations to NQMC in a variety of forms including the following:
This information is used by NQMC to review the submitted measures against the Inclusion Criteria and to subsequently develop the NQMC measure summaries of the submitted measures that meet the Inclusion Criteria.
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Date Modified: 8/24/2009
