(HHS: Washington) -- Designed to advance collaboration within the quality measurement community and to synchronize measurement, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has developed an inventory of quality measures that are used for reporting, payment, or quality improvement by its agencies and operating divisions.

“This effort is pivotal to achieving the goal of transparency in quality measurement as a cornerstone of value-driven health care,” says HHS secretary Mike Leavitt.

Leavitt called on national, regional, state, and local policymakers, health care executives, and clinicians to take advantage of tools the inventory provides; work toward a uniform set of measurements for assessment; and provide clear reports about the quality and value of health care to stakeholders.

“The release of this inventory is an important step in providing health care providers, clinicians, patients, policymakers, and others with reliable, comprehensive information on the department’s efforts to measure and improve health care quality,” says AHRQ director Carolyn Clancy, M.D.

The measures can be sorted by agency or operating division and can be downloaded in their entirety. In the next several months, the inventory will be enhanced so the measure can be sorted by condition, setting, or measure domain.

Measures for this inventory were contributed by: Administration on Aging, Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Indian Health Service, Office of Public Health and Science, National Institutes of Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

The HHS measure inventory is available on the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse

For further information, visit www.hhs.gov/news.