AHRQ awards contract for Web-based clearinghouses

WASHINGTON – The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has awarded a contract to a not-for-profit organization to operate, enhance and maintain two Web-based initiatives designed to gather both clinical practice guidelines and quality measures.

The three-year contract to the ECRI Institute of Plymouth Meeting, Pa., is expected to result in further development of the sites’ contents, with the hope that continuing research on effective care can be brought to patient care.

Many believe that incorporating wide-ranging research and emphasizing care protocols that work can increase efficiency and help the nation’s healthcare system save money by focusing on best practices.

The sister sites are popular with a wide range of users, ranging from nurses to physicians to guideline developers and those doing quality improvement, said Jean Slutsky, director for the Center for Outcomes and Evidence for AHRQ. The national guidelines clearinghouse Web site attracts nearly 1.3 million visitors a month, she said.

The contract provides the opportunity to implement enhancements, establish editorial boards, increase functionality and more easily enable use of the guidelines in a distributed fashion, Slutsky said.

Many users said they wanted improved access to healthcare information, best achieved by consolidating the two sites.

“AHRQ is really well-positioned to push evidence into clinical practice for the best decisions and the highest quality care,” Slutsky said. “Our goal is to have these tools be an asset for improving care.”

The ECRI Institute developed the guidelines clearinghouse in 1999, said Vivian H. Coates, vice president for information services and technology assessment and ECRI’s project director for clearinghouses. She said the most useful features of both clearinghouses enable users to compare guidelines for the same conditions, thus enabling them to do valid comparisons of care protocols.

The guidelines clearinghouse contains summaries of more than 2,100 current evidence-based clinical practice guidelines from more than 300 organizations.

The quality measures clearinghouse, which attracts about 250,000 visits monthly, summarizes more than 1,200 evidence-based quality measures from about 40 organizations.

Coates said many providers already access the clearinghouses during the care delivery process, but ECRI hopes to enlist technology to bring their information closer to the point of care.