About NQMC
The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse™ (NQMC), sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is a database and
Web site for information on specific evidence-based health care quality measures and measure sets.
NQMC is sponsored by AHRQ to promote widespread access to quality measures by the health care
community and other interested individuals.
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).
Key components of NQMC include:
- Structured, standardized abstracts (summaries) containing information about measures and their development.
- A Measure Comparison utility that gives users the ability to
generate side-by-side comparisons for any combination of two or more measures.
- Links to full-text measures (when available) and/or ordering details for the full measure.
- Palm-based PDA Downloads of the Complete NQMC Summary for all measures represented in the database.
- An Expert Commentary feature written/reviewed by the NQMC/NGC
Editorial Board.
Other user-friendly features include the following:
- What's New enables users to see
what measures and features have been added each week and includes an index of all measures in
the NQMC.
- NQMC-L Discussion List
provides health professionals and others with a forum to discuss issues related to quality measure
development, methodology, research, dissemination, implementation, and ongoing use.
- NQMC Update Service is a
weekly electronic mailing of new measures and updates to existing measures posted to the NQMC
Web site.
- Detailed Search enables users
to limit their online searches to quality measures that target a particular disease/condition,
treatment/intervention, age range, gender, vulnerable populations, or settings of care.
- NQMC Browse permits users to scan measures
available on the NQMC site by disease/condition, treatment/intervention, domain, or measure-issuing
organization.
- Glossary provides definitions of
terms used in the standardized abstracts (summaries).
- Using Measures and
Selecting Measures
provides material on how to select, use, apply, and interpret a measure.
- Measure Hierarchy
provides information on measure relationships and levels of measure hierarchies.
- Naming Measures provides
background information and examples for the conventions developed for renaming measures in NQMC.
