ECRI Institute and Silverchair relaunch AHRQ's updated NGC, NQMC Web sites

All new design, new features, much more powerful searching

ECRI Institute, an independent nonprofit that researches the best approaches to improving patient care, and its technology subcontractor, Silverchair, today announce the relaunch of two key healthcare Web sites they have developed for the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The National Guideline Clearinghouse™ (NGC™), www.guideline.gov, and the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse™ (NQMC™), www.qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov, now feature updated design elements, enhanced search functionality, and easier access to all content.    

One of the priorities for the relaunch was the need for clinical practice guidelines and quality measures to be highly accessible and deployable on a standards-based platform in order to support and promote meaningful use across many types of healthcare settings.

"Since the original debut of the National Guideline Clearinghouse and National Quality Measures Clearinghouse by AHRQ in 1999 and 2002 respectively, we have seen much more demand for access to evidence-based clinical guidelines and quality measures by clinicians and healthcare managers," says Vivian H. Coates, vice president of information services and health technology assessment, ECRI Institute, and project director for the ECRI contract to create and maintain the AHRQ Clearinghouses.

"This improved accessibility to guidelines and measure content is seen by application developers as the first step in making this content available through clinical decision support systems," says Coates.

The most significant improvement to the display of guideline and quality measure summaries is the exposure of the indexing classification system applied by the ECRI Institute team to each summary. With the relaunch, this indexing will be displayed and used to connect related content to provide users with pathways to highly relevant information.

"We're thrilled to be launching this next generation of NGC and NQMC to give AHRQ's users easier access to the rich content that's developed in these resources since their inception," says Jean Slutsky, PA, MSPH, director of AHRQ's Center for Outcomes and Evidence.

The two related and linked Web sites use key vocabulary standards including ECRI Institute's Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System™, the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings, and ICD-9-CM and SNOMED CT codes.

"Users of both sites will notice significant improvements in the accuracy of search results due to the introduction of a semantic search engine," says Silverchair's Chief Operating Officer Elizabeth Willingham. "Our semantic content delivery platform is an excellent fit with ECRI Institute's sophisticated standards-based indexing of this critical health care information."

Silverchair has also incorporated its proprietary thesaurus of 289,000 equivalents into the search process to overcome the problem of searching for healthcare information because people typically use different terms to search for exactly the same thing.

The National Guideline Clearinghouse Web site, which logs more than 500,000 user visits each month, contains summaries of more than 2,400 current evidence-based clinical practice guidelines from more than 300 guideline-developing organizations. The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse Web site, with 70,000 user visits each month, summarizes nearly 2,000 evidence-based quality measures from approximately 40 measure-developing organizations.