Miquest

MIQUEST stands for Morbidity Information QUery and Export SynTax.

It provides a method of extracting data in a standardised format from GP software systems. It is not a piece of software, but a written specification of how GP systems should interpret remote queries from enquirers.

An enquirer who might make a query could be a Health Authority computer facilitator, health board/CCG/LSC, Audit group or GP. Queries are searches which interrogate clinical data so as to produce the same answer from the same patient data.

The output is a simple text file, and these answers appear in a specific format. The "language" of the query is a computer readable format called Health Query Language (HQL), which is not dissimilar to SQL. The enquiry is constructed in a special piece of software called a MIQUEST Enquirer, that validates it against the rules of HQL. An enquirer needs to have certain skills and resources to construct a query.

From time to time, an enquirer sends a query or set of queries to the practice on disk or, in the future, electronically. The GPs load the file into their GP system, which then runs the query against their Vision data, using MIQUEST, and produce another simple text file output (the response file) which is the answer to the question. This is then returned to the enquirer by the same method.