About NGC
The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) is a comprehensive database 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 was originally created by AHRQ in
partnership with the American Medical
Association and the American
Association of Health Plans (now America's Health Insurance Plans [AHIP]).
The NGC mission
is to provide physicians, nurses, and other health professionals, health care providers,
health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers and others an accessible mechanism
for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further
their dissemination, implementation and use.
Key components of NGC include:
- Structured abstracts (summaries) about the guideline and its development
- Links to full-text guidelines, where available, and/or ordering information for print copies
- Palm-based PDA Downloads of the Complete NGC Summary
for all guidelines represented in the database.
- A Guideline Comparison
utility that gives users the ability to generate side-by-side comparisons for any combination of two
or more guidelines
- Unique guideline comparisons called
Guideline Syntheses prepared by NGC staff, compare guidelines covering similar topics,
highlighting areas of similarity and difference. NGC Guideline Syntheses often provide a comparison of guidelines
developed in different countries, providing insight into commonalities and differences in international
health practices.
- An electronic forum, NGC-L
for exchanging information on clinical practice guidelines, their development, implementation and use
- An Annotated Bibliography database where
users can search for citations for publications and resources about guidelines, including guideline
development and methodology, structure, evaluation, and implementation
- An Expert Commentary feature written/reviewed by the NGC/NQMC Editorial Board
Other user-friendly features include the following:
- What's New enables users to see what
guidelines have been added each week and includes an index of all guidelines in NGC.
- NGC Update Service is a weekly electronic
mailing of new and updated guidelines posted to the NGC Web site.
- Detailed Search enables users to
create very specific search queries based on the various attributes found in the
NGC Classification Scheme.
- NGC Browse permits users to scan for guidelines
available on the NGC site by disease/condition, treatment/intervention, or developing organization.
- PDA/Palm List provides users with information
regarding the availability of full-text guidelines and/or companion documents available through the guideline
developer, that can be downloaded for the handheld computer (Personal Digital Assistant [PDA], Palm, etc.)
- The AHRQ Evidence Reports page provides a list and links to various reports produced under AHRQ's Evidence-based Practice Program and Effective Health Care Program.
- Glossary provides definitions of terms
used in the standardized abstracts (summaries).
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