The popHealth Tool Development Challenge

Want to create an app and enter a contest by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology? Build something for popHealth.

Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, eligible health care professionals and hospitals can qualify for Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments when they adopt certified EHR technology and use it to achieve specified objectives. These "Meaningful Use" objectives include measureable benchmarks providers must meet to qualify for the incentive payments. popHealth is an open source software service developed under the guidance of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) that automates the reporting of the Stage 1 Meaningful Use clinical quality measures. popHealth integrates with a healthcare provider’s electronic health record (EHR) system using continuity of care records. It streamlines the automated generation of summary quality measure reports on the provider’s patient population.

The popHealth Tool Development Challenge tasks developers with creating applications that leverage the popHealth open source framework, existing functionality, standards, and sample datasets to improve patient care and provide greater insight into patient populations. Specific concepts that can be developed using popHealth include applications that can:

• Help providers improve patient safety
• Help providers use the quality measure calculations to better engage with patients
• Help providers address disparities in the care they provide to their patient populations
• Help providers engage patients and families
• Aggregate data from across multiple sites to allow public health entities to develop a more clearly defined picture of the health status and risk factors within their communities
• Visualize information in the popHealth system related to meaningful use measures
• Target patients with high disease burden in need of early intervention (“hotspotting”)

Learn more about the app development challenge here.