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The National Guideline Clearinghouse™ (NGC) is an Internet-based resource that contains summaries of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and related documents. NGC is an initiative of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NGC has been available as a public resource since December 1998.
NGC's mission is to provide health care professionals with an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation and use.
See the About NGC page for additional information about this national initiative.
Information available on the NGC Web site is intended primarily for the following audiences:
Most NGC users report they use the Internet daily or almost daily to find healthcare related information. The most common reason cited for using the NGC Web site is to find evidence-based clinical practice guidelines.
The NGC Web site logs approximately one million visits each month, on average, with most visits occurring Monday through Friday. In addition, NGC sends out weekly notices of newly published guidelines to more than 38,500 subscribed users.
NGC currently contains summaries for more that 2,300 guidelines from hundreds of national and international organizations. Refer to NGC's Guideline Index for the exact total at any given time; refer to the Organization Browse for a listing of represented guideline developers.
NGC reaches a large audience within the United States and abroad, thereby offering developers an effective vehicle for the dissemination of guidelines that meet the NGC inclusion criteria. New guideline submissions are featured in the NGC News and on the Guidelines In Progress page; when guideline summaries are posted to the NGC Web site they are announced in our What's New Weekly E-mail.
Participating guideline developers are provided the benefit of receiving guideline summary usage reports (annually and by special request) that highlight the number of times (e.g., page views) that each of their guidelines was accessed on the NGC Web site during a specified period of time. This information is an indicator of dissemination of the published guideline(s) within the NGC audience.
The success of NGC depends of the active participation of contributing guideline developers. Your role as a participant is to:
*Note: For guidelines in the public domain, no copyright permission is required.
To facilitate submission of your/your organization's guidelines, 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@guideline.gov.
Additional information regarding NGC is available from Mary Nix, Project Officer, Center for Outcomes and Evidence, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), e-mail: info@guideline.gov.
Visit our Sister Site, the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC), and submit your evidence-based quality measures and measure sets.
NGC provides two reference tools in the Guideline Submission Kit; the Template of Guideline Attributes and the Glossary. These tools will be used by the NGC staff to abstract or summarize your guideline. The NGC Template of Guideline Attributes provides descriptions of each guideline attribute in a NGC Complete Guideline Summary. The NGC Glossary provides clarifying definitions and examples of terms used to describe common properties of evidence-based clinical practice guideline abstracts (guideline summaries). They are provided here to give you some insight to the process.
Download entire Guideline Submission Kit | Zip file (321 KB) | ||
Instructions for Electronic/Hard Copy Submission | PDF (45 KB) | MS WORD (40 KB) | Text (3 KB) |
NGC Inclusion Criteria | PDF (19 KB) | MS WORD (38 KB) | HTML |
Guideline Submission Checklist | PDF (75 KB) | MS WORD (52 KB) | Text (3 KB) |
Template of Guideline Attributes | PDF (64 KB) | MS WORD (116 KB) | HTML |
Glossary of Terms | PDF (138 KB) | MS WORD (80 KB) | HTML |
Copyright Agreement Form | PDF (16 KB) | MS WORD (37 KB) | Text (5 KB) |
Submission Timeline
Please see our Inclusion Criteria page.
There are no copyright restrictions that prevent users from copying and/or distributing content found on the National Guideline Clearinghouse™ (NGC) Web site, provided that all content is appropriately identified. NGC's content (guideline summaries and syntheses) is available for public use, and we encourage the distribution of our content, particularly for educational purposes. NGC content may not be used for commercial and/or product endorsement purposes.
While most of NGC's content is free of restrictions, exceptions occur in where individual guideline developers have requested otherwise. Users can refer to the "COPYRIGHT STATEMENT" field at the end of each summary to determine if such restrictions apply.
NGC does NOT have the authority to grant copyright clearance for the original full text guidelines upon which the summaries are based. NGC seeks and receives permission from each guideline developer whose guidelines appear on the Web site. If you are interested in using/distributing the original full text guideline, you will need to refer to the specific copyright restrictions imposed by the individual guideline developers.
See our Copyright/Permission Requests page for more information.
A variety of documents are submitted to NGC by guideline developers including the following:
This information is used by NGC to compare submitted guidelines against the Inclusion Criteria and to subsequently develop summaries of those submitted guidelines that do meet the Inclusion Criteria.