NQMC - Resources - Measure Hierarchy

Measure Hierarchy

The National Quality Measures Clearinghouse™ (NQMC), sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, enables users to view groups of measures within their organizational context. This presentation of measure relationships is called the Measure Hierarchy.

The levels of the hierarchy captured at NQMC, where applicable, are Collection, Set, Subset, Composite, and Measure. For a given measure, the hierarchy may not include all of these levels.

A Collection is the highest possible level of the measure hierarchy. A Collection may contain one or more Sets, Subsets, Composites, and/or individual Measures.
A Set is the next level of the hierarchy. A Set may include one or more Subsets, Composites, and/or individual Measures.
A Subset is the third level of the hierarchy. A Subset may include one or more Composites, and/or individual Measures.
A Composite is a measure whose score is an aggregate of scores from other measures. A Composite may include one or more other Composites and/or individual Measures. Composites may be comprised of Measures that can or cannot be used on their own; this information is provided in the "DESCRIPTION" field of the Measure Summaries.
A Measure is the lowest level of the hierarchy and may belong to a Composite, Subset, Set, and/or Collection.

NQMC depicts the hierarchy in the Organization Browse by indenting each subsequent level of an organization and providing the level type in brackets (e.g., Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators [Collection]). Users may click on the Collection, Set, Subset, or Composite hyperlinks to drill down to the subsequent levels of the hiearchy. Individual Measures are listed at the lowest level of the hierarchy. Clicking on a measure's title will display a Brief Summary for that measure.

For example, the measure "Acute stroke: mortality rate" is one of the measures in the AHRQ Inpatient Quality Indicators Set which in turn belongs to the AHRQ Quality Indicators Collection.

The hierarchy for this example would look as follows:

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators [Collection]
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Inpatient Quality Indicators [Set]

Measures 1 to 3 of 3
Acute myocardial infarction (AMI): mortality rate. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. 2004 Dec. NQMC:001472
Acute stroke: mortality rate. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. 2004 Dec. NQMC:001475
Congestive heart failure (CHF): mortality rate. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. 2004 Dec. NQMC:001474

Note: The levels Subset and Composite do not apply in this example and are not represented in this example of the hierarchy.

As a reminder, the Organization Browse contains the compilation of measures from the developer organization that met the NQMC Inclusion Criteria. Some organizations may have additional measures that do not meet NQMC Inclusion Criteria. Additionally, not all measures from a particular organization may have been submitted to NQMC. Therefore, the compilation of measures for an organization, represented in the Organization Browse, may not include all of the organization's measures.

The NQMC related feature Measure Index can also be used to view measures organized alphabetically by measure developer and/or submitter name.

Send questions regarding Measure Hierarchy to info@qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov.

Measure Hierarchy

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