popHealth Tool Development Challenge

About the Challenge

Challenge Background

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.

Challenge Description

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”)

Judging Criteria

• Ability to integrate with popHealth system and build upon existing functionality
• Impact on stakeholders, such as:
• Clear impact on helping providers improve patient safety
• Clear impact on helping providers better engage with patients
• Improving public health entities’ ability to identify populations at risk
• Usability and design from the standpoint of all stakeholders
• Creativity and Innovation