As the government gears up to develop standards for meaningful use Stages 2 and 3, the American Medical Association and MITRE Corporation, on behalf of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, are working on a project to help test the collection of population health "in the real world."
The project is called popHealth and it is free and online. According to Rob McCready, the project leader for popHealth at the MITRE Corporation, popHealth is a reporting tool for meaningful use that uses clinical quality reporting, The tool empowers providers to understand the health of their particular patient populations and identify opportunities to improve care.
"It's easy to use, portable, accessible and open source," McCready said at a Tuesday morning session of HIMSS11. "If you have the data and the IT infrastructure, all that's needed is your time."
McCready said the project invites vendors to study the tool as a reference for creating their own or they can implement the tool as part of their products. The tenets of the project are to inspire creativity, transparency, auditability and lower costs. "We welcome feedback, both positive and critical," he said. All feedback along with more information about popHealth is on the project's website.
PopHealth would be of no use without standardized data collection, and that's where Karen Kmetik, vice president of the American Medical Association, comes in. Kmetik works with the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement, convened by AMA, to try and build public and provider confidence in quality measures. Kmetik said her group takes the measures written by policymakers and stakeholders and tests them in the real world.
Last December, her group put together a network of provider sites that are testing potential performance measures for Stages 2 and 3 "in the real world," before they become part of the regulations, Kmetik said.
Some of the difficulties the consortium has discovered so far include: diagnosis codes that don't exist yet; multiple value sets available; and situations where guidance needs to be provided. "We wouldn't know that unless folks like you said this doesn't quite make sense," she told the audience.
"We're walking down this road while we're building it," Kmetik said. "I find that fun. Some people don't find it fun, but I do."