The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), have announced that the trio of government agencies will soon launch the NLM Value Set Authority Center (VSAC). This will provide downloadable access to all official versions of vocabulary Value Sets contained in Clinical Quality Measures that support Meaningful Use Stage 2.
The value sets provide lists of the numerical values and individual names from standard vocabularies used to define the clinical concepts (e.g. diabetes, clinical visit) used in the quality measures. Access to the Value Set Authority Center will require a free Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus License. If an organization does not have an UMLS license, the agencies encourage for it to apply for one as soon as possible.
