Glossary

Agile development is a term used to describe iterative software development used to shorten the software development lifecycle and emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. Agile development teams execute the entire software development lifecycle in smaller increments, usually called sprints, typically 1-4 weeks long. The software development industry often contrasts agile development with traditional or waterfall development, where the planning for larger projects occurs up front and executed against that plan. Agile development is an iterative approach to development with regular feedback loops or intervals. These iterations allow diversion of a team to be productive in one part of a project while resolving a problem or issue in another part. 

Alignment with respect to the process of ensuring that similar standardized quality measures are used consistently across different programs and sectors, both in government and private initiatives. This involves harmonizing measures so that they are compatible and comparable, which helps in providing clear and consistent information for patients, consumers, and stakeholders. Alignment is achieved when a set of measures works well across settings or programs to produce meaningful information without creating extra work for those responsible for the measurement.

An analytic model for developing clinical practice guidelines is a visual representation of a causal pathway showing the linkages between how the proposed key research question(s) and intervention(s) under consideration as reflected in the PICOTS (P-Patient population; I- Intervention; C- Comparator; O- Outcome; T- Timing; S- Setting) framework and to their intended outcomes requiring confirmation by evidence review to support related recommendations. The linkages in the model represent critical logical premises and presumed relationships among intermediate, surrogate, and ultimate health outcomes related to a specified clinical question. Woolf, S., Schünemann, H. J., Eccles, M. P., Grimshaw, J. M., Shekelle, P. (2012). Developing clinical practice guidelines: types of evidence and outcomes; values and economics, synthesis, grading, and presentation and deriving recommendations. Implementation Science, 7(61). https://implementationscience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1748-5908-7-61

An application programming interface (API) is a system of tools and resources in an operating system enabling developers to create software applications. An API is a software intermediary allowing two applications to talk to each other. Each time you use an app like Facebook, send an instant message, or check the weather on your phone, you are using an API. Frye, M-K. (n.d.). What is an API? Retrieved September 13, 2023, from https://www.mulesoft.com/resources/api/what-is-an-api

A computational artifact is anything created by a human using a computer. An artifact can be, but not limited to a code, program, image, audio, video, presentation, or web page file. 

The ASTP/ONC Project Tracking System (Jira) is a collaboration platform hosted by the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP)/Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). It provides users with a common place to transparently log, track, and discuss issues with subject matter experts on many topics, including electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) implementation. CMS uses Jira during most phases of the eCQM lifecycle, including development, implementation, and maintenance.  The ASTP/ONC Project Tracking  System (Jira) and Confluence have a 90-day account deactivation policy for all users who have not logged into systems for a period of 90 days or longer. 

Reminder: 
This is an open platform that does not intend for users to communicate sensitive or confidential information such as protected health information and personal identifiable information.