ONC-funded Query Health Initiative pilots achieve success

Three pilots funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) successfully validated the potential to distribute population-level health queries and responses across different clinical platforms, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The ONC’s Query Health Initiative aims to develop standards and services that can distribute population health queries from EHRs to network data partners.

Researchers reviewed Query Health Initiative activities including three pilots, which were implemented by:

  • The FDA, which transmitted and responded to queries in the cloud
  • The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which measured the Query Health Initiative’s speed and accuracy of adding various practices and health information exchanges to the program
  • Massachusetts, which looked to implement the query health envelope standard to test its flexibility and security control.

“As Query Health evolves, on-the-fly translation between health quality measures format and local formats may allow interoperability among systems, creating an infrastructure for comprehensive population health queries. Lessons learned from the Query Health experiment are informing the ONC's data access framework, which will encourage data availability for future cross-platform use cases,” wrote the authors.

Read the study here.

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