Query Health Pilot Boosts PHM

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Population-level health trends help the ONC monitor, improve public health; three of the Query Health pilot programs have met platform goals

The ONC launched the Query Health Initiative, which according to iHealth Beat, “Aims to develop standards and services that can distribute population health queries from certified electronic health record systems to network data partners,” in 2011. The initiative involved developing:

• A platform-neutral query and result language;
• A standard Query Envelope to securely send queries and results; and
• Other standards.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association shows three of the Query Health pilot programs have demonstrated the potential for the distribution of population-level health queries and responses across different clinical platforms. These three pilots include projects by:

• FDA, which stored technology to securely transmit and respond to queries in a cloud
• New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is testing the Query Health Initiative's  accuracy and speed for adding various practices and health information exchange organizations to its health surveillance program
• Massachusetts, which focused on fully implementing the Query Envelope standard to test its flexibility and security control

“The idea is that data is more secure in its original location; individual organizations process queries and disclose only the minimum necessary information to answer queries. Responses are aggregated, then sent to the researcher,” explains Fierce Health IT.

Researchers following the pilot programs concluded their test of the Query Health system supplied a functional methodology and reference implementation for distributed population health queries and has validated the program in all three pilots.